The Prize
by Warrion
Summary: After he is poisoned, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa must find the being the who did it and are forced into the labrinyth of a madman who must have a Time Lord to undo his greatest mistake.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's notes: I got the idea for this story based on two basic things and a few others, the primary of the two being those bloody endless corridors on "Doctor Who". There were few episodes that didn't have them, whether they were metal, stone, a path through the jungle, or had Tom Baker stomping through them and shaking the walls. (This literally did happen when he didn't like the script.) Space, it seems, is full of corridors, endless, twisting, dark, mysterious, and threatening corridors (read CHEAP sets) and lunatics. _

_The second reason was Peter Davison's very breathy delivery under stress which my best friend Maureen told me she'd read was perhaps due to asthma. She's usually right about such things but it was a long time ago. In any case… the other minor factors were simply the wonderful balance that was struck by The Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan and how Tegan had changed when she came back. I guess Heathrow wasn't as much fun as the rest of the Universe…_

The TARDIS grumbled again. This time Tegan heard it. The first time she hadn't but there were scorch marks on the Doctor's abandoned jacket to prove that something had gone wrong before, too. The unhinged roundels lay on the floor of the timeship, three in all, wires spilling out of them and bundles of translucent circuits behind them glowing. Well, at least some of them. A few strands of smoke still drifted around the ceiling to mark the passing of those that were no longer aglow. Tegan's first clue that something else had gone wrong was an unexpected "Hello" from the floor of her room - a greeting Nyssa had offered with dull resignation. The Doctor was fixing things again, things he had typically and mysteriously not shared. Without a word, the Traken girl had picked herself up, half-dressed, knowing the Doctor barely noticed such things and gone to help him. He'd told them, at last, he was going to root out the tracking device he'd detected aboard the time ship, one that had been there since he'd left Gallifrey with Nyssa. Tegan had been sorry she'd missed the Doctor's homeworld while she was busy getting sacked from her job on her own but Nyssa's story about their attempt to execute the Doctor had cured her curiosity quickly.

Tegan had half expected to wake up like this… had even thought of tying herself to the bed, but then thought the better of it. Sometimes things actually got into the TARDIS, despite the fancy gizmos that kept most things out. That had all been seventeen hours ago. After fifteen hours straight of helping the Doctor, which even for Nyssa consisted mostly of keeping track of his chattering with himself, the younger girl had gone back to bed with linkage fluid still on her hands and sleeves. It was then that they'd decided to stay with him in shifts. Nyssa'd missed the nifty explosion, and seeing how Tegan hadn't even jumped or reacted to the sparky "THUMP" that coincided with a shower of singed green chips and optical cables from the opening into which the Doctor's hands had vanished. The Doctor's only reaction to the explosion had been a squint and a breathy, "No, it's not that one," and a slow glance at Tegan that reflected his amazement that he'd not heard a second explosion from the direction of his Terran companion. She'd only wafted the smoke away from them both and handed him the next tool.

"Silence in your case is deafening." The Doctor commented, apparently wanting to invite one of her snappy replies, perhaps to vent his own frustration. This was the eighth of the roundels he'd opened and searched, trying to find the indistinct warning signal. All the TARDIS could tell him was that it had come from the Console room but he had spotted the intruder this time.

Tegan managed a half-smile. "All the arguing's ever gotten me is an explanation I didn't understand, and I'm here this time because I want to be. I know the routine. You want me to heat up that tea?" She pointed at the half-empty cup sitting on the floor of the TARDIS. One of the errant wires had drifted over the brim and into the brown liquid.

"Not necessary, thanks. That's what the wire is doing. Thermal circuit, you see."

"Clever." Tegan lapsed into silence again and refolded her legs in the opposite positions. Another half-hour of tool-handing and mumbling passed. She watched as the Doctor slowly replaced each circuit and tested it somehow by simply touching it. Out of boredom and on impulse she leaned over and reached into the opening herself, her short, bright green dress drawing further up her legs as she stretched. The Doctor looked at her with a slow turn of his head after a moment, curious to why she had reached into the opening at first and then wondering why her slender fingers now remained in contact with the delicate circuits.

"Tegan?"

She didn't hear him, or actually was ignoring him for a moment. A feeling of warmth and contentment had filled her, and a feeling she couldn't quite place but that was pleasant and joyful. After several moments it faded and her eyes focused on the falsely youthful visage of the Doctor, a sudden understanding in them. "I guess I haven't been listening that closely. I didn't know what you meant by "synaptic interface" but I do now. They're trying to force the TARDIS itself to tell them where you are. They put that tracking thing in the telepathic circuits, didn't they?"

The Doctor stopped working for the first time in hours. She'd been wondering how his arms had taken the strain. He turned toward her with a bright smile. "Indeed they are. It seems, terrible as it was, that your encounter with the Mara may have left you a very special gift, access to your latent telepathic abilities. Almost all races have them but it takes, in most cases, contact with another race that already has the talent to activate it. Extremely few of my Companions have experienced the mind of the TARDIS. Amazing, isn't it?"

Tegan was oddly silent, wanting to take hold of one of the circuits again but stopping herself, feeling as if she would have been abusing a privilege or afraid that she would become addicted to the strange contentment she'd glimpsed. "It was a lot of things, Doc," she finally said. "Amazing was one of them. Do you sense that all the time?"

"Within a certain range, yes." His elbows fell to the floor and his eyes suddenly seemed to be looking into her, himself, and the Universe all at once. "No Human has ever had that experience, only Romana, and she was a Time Lady. I wonder why you were chosen."

"I thought you said it was because of the Mara, just because I could."

The Doctor sat up, the tracing device forgotten for a moment. "I did, but telepathy is a mutual experience. The TARDIS had to choose to share herself with you. I can't help but wonder why."

Tegan smiled lopsidedly. "Well, I guess this is the one time your curiosity can't get you in trouble. Why don't you ask her?"

The Doctor gathered his legs up and pushed himself back toward the opening in the wall. "Because she'll tell me if or when she's ready or it becomes necessary. TARDISes are finicky things that way."

"I thought you said telepathy was a two-way street. She can…talk… transmit… whatever, to you but you can't ask anything of her?"

More smoke drifted out of the opening as the Doctor reconnected the improperly severed circuit and cut another one to make room for the work of detaching the tracer. "It's rather hard to explain. I am a Time Lord; I have a great knowledge of the history of many races, and a great understanding of where their choices can take them into their futures, and command of the knowledge and technology that allows travel between the alternate realities those choices create."

"In theory, at least."

The Doctor's now-blue eyes narrowed and he drew a loud breath to sigh but then caught the teasing smile on Tegan's face, perhaps a shadow of the steadiness he knew the TARDIS emanated most times. "Yes, in theory," he admitted, recalling how many times Heathrow had _not_ shown up on the viewer. "But, as I was about to say, we do not physically in and of ourselves travel about time. We need TARDISes for that and by their very essence they are interlaced with the fabric of the Universe. That is what gives them consciousness and their ability to interface with the Time Lord who controls them, but because of that connectedness, we are very careful of our interactions with them. It's not for the use of idle curiosity. They know what needs to be shared and when to share it."

"But that was because they were built that way by you lot."

"Yes but once constructed, and with a bit of experience on their part, TARDISes, like children, become more than the sum of their parts. We respect who they then become and the more experienced ones, like my TARDIS, are partners in what we do, not simply transports. It's why I trust the old girl so much. As old as I am in your terms, the TARDIS is much older than I."

"But if they're their own life-form, why did you say "my TARDIS"?

"Oh really, Tegan, how do you refer to your mother?"

"Good point," she answered after a moment, and then she became thoughtful for several long moments. The tool that was in her hand hovered in mid-air, stopping as a sudden warm flash of understanding ended her ability to focus on much of anything else. "You mean, what I felt, what you always feel, is that sense of how the Universe really is, apart from all the creeps we seem to find."

The Doctor sat up again, glancing at the doors leading into the large, round room as if he were suddenly afraid they would open, that some intrusion would disturb this moment with his returned Companion. Or perhaps he was afraid to meet Tegan's eyes for a moment, afraid of what had been shared by the three of them, a sharing that had been so oddly out of his awareness. He hadn't even felt Tegan's presence when she had been in contact with the TARDIS, as if the entity in the Universe who knew him best had wanted to suddenly keep this secret. He became aware that Tegan was still looking at him, looking nothing like she usually came to mind, unhappy and loud or fierce and louder. "Yes," he finally breathed, still staring, still seeing her for the first time in the wake of her sharing and the TARDIS's strange silence. "It's not that bad a place, all in all. For every one of those with evil intent we confront, there are the billions of decent beings who are their victims. Sadly, we've encountered far fewer of those. I hope to fix that now that you've returned, a real holiday, no creatures, no demented beings, no…".

"Master…," Tegan filled in, some of that ferocity returning. The mention of him made her refocus on more negative things and she finished handing the Doctor the oscillating scanner. "Why doesn't the Master's TARDIS have the same effect or can he resist it?"

The Doctor let the oscillator begin its work, telling him what energy pathways had been rerouted properly and which needed fine-tuning, and considered Tegan's question. "Because, I think, he must have certainly corrupted her connection to what is decent in the Universe and now that he's done that, his own every thought is influenced by the darkness he's created. For their incredible power, their synaptic interface makes them vulnerable. That's why Rassilon was so careful when he created the curriculum and training it takes to become a Time Lord, at least one of the reasons." He looked up at the tracer as the oscillator beeped its completion, and flashed a scowl Tegan would've been proud to call her own. "It's also why the High Council was so angry when I left with a TARDIS, and this wasn't even a current model then."

Tegan shifted her weight and studied the Doctor as he focused on following the corrections the alien tool had told him to make. There had been so many times when she had seen the Doctor use that knowledge to save so many and to save her and Nyssa. She finally folded her arms and leaned forward on her crossed knees, mouth twisting into its usual expression of disapproval. "Seems awfully selfish of them to bother learning how half the Universe works and then stand around and let people suffer if they could help it."

"Yes, my thoughts exactly. Well, most of the time. Occasionally it's best to leave things alone," the Doctor answered then sat up, a victorious smile on his seemingly young face, in his hand was a small rectangle of gray metal and a dark blue crystal. "Well, that ends their finding me, whoever they are."

"What do you mean 'whoever'? I thought that was some silly try of the Time Lords to keep tabs on you."

"So would I have, but that technology doesn't seem to be Gallifreyan. In fact, I can't say where---."

"Doctor!" Tegan's shout reverberated around the Console room as the two prongs extended out from the end of the rectangle facing away from him, out of his line of sight. He gasped as they impaled his palm and again when Tegan's hand closed like lightening over the tracer and snatched it away to clatter against the wall. She turned back to find the Doctor clutching his bleeding hand and a small but considerable amount of orange-red blood coating his fingers. A few drops had made it to the floor. She snapped up the napkin that had been sitting on the floor near the cup of forgotten tea. "Here. Let me see."

"No, get Nyssa. Hurry."

Tegan seized his hand and pulled it toward her, finding him surprisingly unresistant. "Come on, don't be silly. You don't need a biochemist for this." She pressed the napkin against the wounds and clamped her fingers down on his wrist to slow the bleeding. She looked up in surprise as the Doctor sagged toward her and caught him with the hand not holding the napkin. "What's wrong? It can't be a little blood."

The Doctor took hold of her tensed shoulder, pulling himself up slightly. "No, of course, not. The tracer, it's not from Gallifrey, … but it seems… the poison is."

Tegan went from shock to anger in seconds, and anger moved her. She stood up, keeping hold of the Doctor as she did and snagging his jacket with her foot, dragging it toward them and lowering the Doctor's head onto its rolled up bulk. She glanced around for several more seconds for a rope, a strap, anything long and flexible enough and found the only thing in reach was the Doctor's braces. Her grip still crushing his wrist, she undid the one nearest his injured hand and wrestled it out from beneath him with roughness she regretted but couldn't help. Fighting the elasticity, she wrapped it around his wrist several times before she slid her own fingers out and braced his hand up against the wall by resting it on the tool box. Satisfied she had done what she could, she breathed again and looked down at the Doctor, using her blood-streaked hand to touch his face. Where his skin was cool normally, it now felt cold and he was watching her through eyes that were struggling to focus. "You're a better nurse than I might have expected, Tegan. You've gained me some time; perhaps enough, though I don't know what the result of this is supposed to be." He paused, a look of curiosity on his face that Tegan could have strangled him for. "How very odd. I think one of my hearts has stopped."

Tegan kept surprisingly calm and pitched her voice low and soft. "How many snakebites do you think we get to see in the Outback, Doc?" Even in his fog, the Doctor suddenly knew a few of them had not turned out well. She ran her clean hand through his hair, "Hang on. I'll have Nyssa here in a second. No regenerating while I'm gone."

"I believe you've prevented that," the Doctor answered, but his eyes suddenly closed and his head fell to the side. Tegan was gone before he began his next shallow breath.


	2. Chapter 2

Ch. 2

Nyssa heard Tegan coming before she exploded into their room, her bright green dress still twisted around her middle where she'd been sitting on the floor. "Tegan, what's the---."

"Hurry. The Doctor — that thing he's been trying to get out of the TARDIS was booby-trapped. He's been poisoned."

Nyssa didn't answer, merely leapt from her bed and in her night clothes bolted after Tegan's fleeing form. She did not run immediately to the Console room but to the lab for a spray injector, plus a portable bioscanner and an assortment of neurochemical compounds she knew would work on Gallifreyans. She swept them into plastic case whose previous contents she spilled out onto the floor and headed to the Console Room.

Tegan's head snapped around as she entered, looking past the Console from where she knelt directly across from the interior door. "Where've you --- Oh. I guess you couldn't do much without some equipment."

Nyssa's quick eye spotted the tracer on the floor and used a pair of what looked to Tegan like pliers from the Doctor's tool kit to pick it up. "Is this the tracer? I don't recognize it."

"Yeah, that's it."

"Good, with luck I'll be able to get an undiluted sample of the toxin." She placed it on the Console and knelt down on the other side of the Doctor, calm and efficient, hiding behind science to keep the fear and worry off her face. She waved the bioscanner over him and watched the readout on the small screen carefully, increasingly aware of Tegan trying to bite her tongue as she waited. "One of his hearts has stopped and the walls of his chest are constricting so tightly he's barely able to breathe. He's lost 80 percent of his lung capacity but he can only survive so long on his bypass respiratory system. I have to get the muscles to unlock. They constrict more every time he exhales, fortunately Gallifreyans don't have a substantial respiratory rate." Calmed by technicalities and an inkling of what to do, she was able to stave off the fear and think clearly. Tegan, however, was not reassured.

"So now what do we - you do?"

Nyssa began rooting through the blue plastic case. "I'm going to give him an injection but we may need to keep his lungs inflated by force. Go to the Medical room; over the bed you'll see a respirator unit that shouldn't look very different from the ones on Earth. A catch at the bottom will detach it from the wall."

Tegan bolted from the room yet again, and left Nyssa to her work. She found the most powerful combination of compounds available to her in the small case, made a guess (a very highly educated one) at the dosage from the Doctor's weight, the time since he'd been poisoned, the level of effect the toxin was having already, and her knowledge of Gallifreyan metabolism, which was blessedly slow. The last factor made her change the normal injection site of the jugular to a more direct route. She tugged the Doctor's sweater and shirt up, her worry deepening at the ice-cold feel of his smooth skin. She pressed the cold injector against his sides and unloaded it twice directly into the brutally contracted muscles. The Doctor lay still for a moment and then took a sudden long, wheezing breath that brought him up off the floor. She pushed the coat closer to him and then forced him again to the floor with his head arched back and his airway held open as he took several long, gasping breaths.

Tears of relief stung at Nyssa's eyes, but she held them back to keep the Doctor from seeing the extent of her concern. He was probably quite frightened himself and adrenalin wouldn't help matters now as it had when the beginning of this regeneration had gone so badly. His eyes fluttered open as Nyssa loaded another injection and she met them for a shy instant as she reached beneath his shirt again to inject his lateral muscles. Moments after she injected his jugular, another gasping breath entered and escaped him and she could see on the bioscanner that his stalled heart was beating again, if sluggishly. She met his eyes more firmly and pressed a finger to his lips. She had learned from Tegan that sometimes the direct path was best.

"Sshhhh.. just breathe. The toxin is a neuromuscular stimulant targeted to your thoracic and lateral muscles. It caused your chest cavity to nearly crush itself. I'm not sure it hasn't caused ligament damage or bruised the heart muscle." The Doctor nodded, just breathing, knowing he was in the best possible hands to find the solution to a toxin, a mind equal to his own in such matters. He smiled a weak reassurance at Tegan as she ran in with the respirator, having shed her shoes to move more quickly. She circled the Console and knelt down next to him.

"Well, how long before he recovers?"

Nyssa looked up from rolling back the Doctor's sleeve, fear skirting on her face again before she returned behind a clinical wall. "I've delayed the effect of the toxin, Tegan, not ended the threat." She kept hold of the Doctor's hand to steady it as she used the microtransporter to draw a considerable amount of blood. "I need to take a sample of the poison, screen it, and make an anti-toxin that will either block its ability to affect the Doctor or eliminate it… if I can."

"What do mean "if"?" Tegan demanded, quietly and tightly, she had long ago learned to hate the word "if".

"Tegan, you know I'll do my best, but I cannot offer us all promises right now. If I can get the Doctor stabilized he'll be more than able to help. We must deal with this together and then find out who did this."

That landed home. Tegan was suddenly angry again, who had done this having been forgotten in the rush to help the Doctor. Making someone answer for this was certainly more along her line of capabilities but for now they had to tackle getting the Doctor in a condition to contribute to the solution and the chase. Tegan sighed sharply and then remembered the respirator in her hand. She offered it up and Nyssa reached over the Doctor to adjust the controls as Tegan rested her hand on the Doctor's head and held the clear mask to his face, leaning down close to him as she did. "Don't' worry, Doc. We'll get you out of this mess and we'll put whoever did it in a worse one."

The Doctor found himself smiling slightly as he felt the intensity of her mind and purity of will, perhaps it was his sudden vulnerability that made them seem even more pronounced. After all, leave it to Tegan to comfort and reassure with a threat on her lips. Finished what she could do here, Nyssa got to her feet and with a small, confident smile gathered up her equipment and the tracer to head back to the laboratory. "Doctor, I'm sure there's at least some internal damage. I would suggest a healing trance while you're breathing pure oxygen. Tegan, it's safe to release the tourniquet." She was gone a moment later, before either acknowledged her.

Tegan took the Doctor's cold hand in her lap and undid the binding she had made then rubbed his wrist vigorously until the normal color had returned to his fingers. She remained where she was, chattering nervously at intervals and wishing Gallifreyans breathed more even under normal circumstances so that she wouldn't be tempted to poke the Doctor every other minute. Her only signs that he was no longer at the same level of distress was the fact that his skin was still warmer than it had been and his eyes moved occasionally as he lay in the healing trance that at best would only repair the damages a while longer. Tegan let her quiet stream of cheerful nonsense trail off, realizing the Doctor likely couldn't hear her and hoped that somehow her presence was of some support. She'd broken the strap on the respirator mask in her hurry to pull it off the wall and needed to hold the mask in place as she waited. Remembering her telepathic experience with the TARDIS, she tried to keep her thoughts positive, suspecting that even now, he might be able to sense them.

Three hours passed before the Doctor tried to sit up and was able to do so strongly enough that Tegan's only protest was a glare of silent, irritated rebuke and a warning they could wait for Nyssa to return. He would be careful, he explained, but it was better that they go to her so that he would be in the lab if she needed to do more tests. Tegan sighed and gave into logic but took the respirator and his rolled up jacket with them as they slowly walked to the equipment-cluttered room.

Nyssa greeted their arrival with a bright smile but went immediately back to work as the Doctor stood behind her and read the long stream of notes she had entered into the computer already. "So much so soon. You're amazing."

She didn't look up from what looked to Tegan like a microscope framed by three illuminated prisms. "Not really. The compounds are easy enough to identify; it's the genetic marker that makes it so powerful. It's not targeted to you personally at least; that would've made it much harder to defeat because it would have taken much more careful engineering, but it is a compound that only affects Time Lords. In another few hours, I'll know the answer to what might be," she faltered for words for a moment and then found ones that were inadequate, "the most dangerous element of it."

"Might be…," Tegan interjected, setting the respirator down noisily. "I think a poison that does the job of a boa constrictor is dangerous enough. What more is there?"

Nyssa took a tired breath and met the other woman's eyes for a long moment before turning to the Doctor. "If we don't find a way to neutralize or eliminate it, it not only can suffocate or cause thoracic trauma or pulmonary or dual cardiac arrest, it seems it will then also even prevent regeneration. There's a ribonucleic acid destabilizer keyed to Gallifreyan DNA."

The Doctor didn't react immediately, obviously having heard her as he stood so near, completing his scan of her notes. When he did respond it was only with a flattering smile for the young Trakenite. "I believe you're quite correct. It seems to prevent the genetic resplicing that normally undoes the damage we might have suffered. Regeneration itself actually triggers death. I hate to say it but brilliant."

Tegan huffed again, not knowing at whom she was madder at the moment. "Brilliant! How can you be so…. so… bloody calm? That's you who might not regenerate."

Nyssa picked up the stylus again, more able to write with it on the screen while her eyes returned to her work. "We're all very concerned, Tegan, but the best thing we can do is apply ourselves to a cure." Nyssa's face was pressed again to the viewer as she worked the controls but from his place beside her, the Doctor solemnly watched the tears rolling down the back of the device that Tegan couldn't see. Both of them had seen deaths in their families, of Adric, Nyssa even the death of her world, and they both had chosen to travel with him, and now were facing his death as well in a Universe that had offered them little in the way of kindness. As much as he didn't want to leave it, he also wished to not leave them to it.

Sighing, he moved to sit down on one of the rolling stools in the room but Nyssa extended a hand to stop him, not looking up from the scope. There was a sudden energy about her small frame and she adjusted the controls again with the hand not pointed at the Doctor. "No, on the bed. I think I've found the primary compound that embeds itself in the nerve sheath and delivers the neural overload. It recognizes the blood as Gallifrey and it's trying to latch on to the blood cells but it can't."

The Doctor did as she asked, lowering himself onto the table and meeting Nyssa's eyes as she approached him. "It looks like your difficult regeneration may come to some good, I had a chance to study Gallifreyan synaptic tissue and neurotransmitters quite carefully before we reached Castrovalva," Nyssa hesitated momentarily, her small face rippling with a momentary struggle to put a demon at bay. She focused again on the Doctor and the present. "I need another sample."

The Doctor obliging stuck out his arm but Nyssa took his hand and raised it above his head. "No, not blood. Tegan, please help me."

Relieved to have something to contribute, the twice-former air hostess came forward, remembering to bring the respirator with her. She snapped it back in the wall as she moved to the other side of the bed. "Just tell me what."

Nyssa was pulling drawers out in the stand supporting the bed, "Expose the Doctor's side. I need deep nerve and muscular tissue samples from the affected area to test my theory. If I can confirm the compound's the molecular construct I suspect we'll know what to attack or perhaps I can formulate a neutralizing agent or a catalyst to create one."

Tegan had no idea what she was talking about but nodded and turned a ruffled smile on the Doctor. She might have been a bit uncomfortable as she knew he had to be but she'd faced far, far worse in the past year or so than the Doctor's reserve. She tugged him upright quickly and slid her hands beneath the sweater, moving too fast to let him think. Caught off-guard and still slightly light-headed from his near suffocation, blood loss, and the following infusion of pure oxygen, he merely raised his arms as she completed the job and lay his sweater down on the counter behind her. She reached for his shirt buttons much to the Doctor's surprise and had laid her hands firmly on the first one when Nyssa intervened.

"That won't be necessary."

Tegan's hands withdrew immediately and the Doctor's fell away from where he'd been making a half-hearted – or in the case of a Gallifreyan – one-hearted attempt to, if not stop her, then take care of his own buttons himself, as he had for a number of centuries. Blushing slightly, not meeting Tegan's eyes he lay back and once again Nyssa raised his arm above his head. At his waist he saw Tegan reaching for his shirt and then suddenly pull back. "Don't we need to wash up or something?"

Nyssa shook her head, her eyes scanning the small array of equipment and the bandage she had prepared. "No, the bed generates its own sterile field. Don't be concerned this is a very simple procedure."

The Doctor started slightly at the immediate fall of Tegan's fiery hands upon his waist as she tugged more of his shirt out and folded it under. If she noticed, she didn't show it. Her hands were almost painfully hot on the more sensitive skin of his side as she secured the fabric back out of the way. "Is that high enough?"

Nyssa nodded and picked up the first bit of equipment. They all looked a great deal alike to Tegan, cylindrical and about six inches long but with different devices at the ends and different lights and control switches. "I hope you can tell those things apart."

Nyssa gave her a small, conceding smile. "Of course. They all seem quite different to me." The biochemist's blue eyes focused back on the Doctor for the first time. "I'm going to give you a local anesthetic but there's no telling what effects the drug may be having on your system since it's a neural stimulant. If you feel anything tell me and I'll try to concentrate the dosage. Failing that I'll have to synthesize a general anesthetic because very strangely you don't seem to have any aboard that would work on Gallifreyans. Unfortunately where I'll be working I can't really do a spinal block unless…", her voice trailed off as the Doctor shook his head.

"It's fine, Nyssa. You'll do splendidly." The Time Lord met her eyes and then closed his, waiting, and nearly opened them again when he felt an impossibly warm hand slide onto the arm Nyssa had raised above his head, his cool fingers hesitating for a moment before opening to return Tegan's gentle but steady grip. He squeezed her wrist once and quickly. "I knew I was in good hands, literally it seems." Tegan squeezed his hand back and willed like Hell for the TARDIS to behave for the next few minutes. "Nyssa, whenever you're ready."

"I already started. Can you feel this?" She looked up from the sharpened probe she was pressing into his side, not quite deep enough to break the skin.

"Nothing at all," the Doctor answered, calm and trusting, perhaps the least nervous of the three, certainly less than Tegan whose grip on his arm was now nearing what it had been when she was trying to stop the poison.

"All right then," Nyssa said quietly and picked up a different cylinder than the one with the injector spray head. "I think it's safe to get started."


	3. Chapter 3

The laser cut easily through the skin and the thin layers of tissue beneath, cauterizing it cleanly, and finally baring the orange and red bands of tissue that wrapped in glistening striated layers around the Doctor's ribs. She switched the tool so it stopped cutting and used a small forcefield to hold the wound open, then with her other hand picked up the tool that would extract a few strands of the muscle tissue. She could see herself that it was still twitching on occasion, caught between the toxin urging it to contract and the counteragent. With a few deft swipes, she liberated several fibers of muscle and placed them in a medium designed to support Gallifreyan tissue.

Flexing her neck, she straightened for a moment. "That's the first done. How are you, Doctor?"

He didn't open his eyes, merely nodded. "Fine, Nyssa. You're doing as well as I knew you would, perhaps even better. Do you have a nerve cluster selected to remove?"

She started to nod and offered a quick foolish smile to Tegan's wide but calm and trusting brown eyes. "Yes, I saw a few good candidates just beneath two bands of muscle. I'll want nerve cells that carry signals to the muscular structure. If the toxin is tailored to such a specific grouping we must give it the right target to attack."

"Of course," the Doctor agreed. His breathing picked up a little, which Tegan and Nyssa both understood as a signal that he wished Nyssa to get started again.

The biochemist picked up the device she had used to extract the muscle tissue and reset it before bending over slightly again. "You must tell me the moment you feel anything. I've isolated the nerve stem. I'm about to sever it."

Tegan's free hand fell onto the Doctor's arm nearest her, the one not folded over his head, and she watched his face for the least sign of discomfort, knowing full well that if Nyssa had said it was necessary that she run him through with a sword he'd calmly damn well let her. His breathing had quickened slightly, still too shallow for even his kind, but he squeezed her other arm twice as if trying to reassure her. Tegan smiled slightly, odd that their conflicts had become so familiar that they could now have them without opening their mouths. Even on an operating table he was trying to keep the upper hand. Bloody Time Lord. Her smile faded for a moment as his grip tightened sharply and she felt the muscles in his other arm knot beneath her hand even as she clamped down on it. She returned his grip, if not as strongly just as fiercely. At the same exact moment, Nyssa straightened.

"That's done. I'll have this sealed up in moment. Are you all right, Doctor?"

He opened his eyes, "There is one problem."

Nyssa's eyes widened but her voice was steady. "Tell me."

"Tegan's very close to breaking my wrist." He grinned wickedly and Tegan released her grip with an annoyed flourish.

Nyssa sniffed a small relieved laugh and after a moment Tegan gave into one of her own. "You have anything in there that'll make him not such a smartass?"

The Doctor lowered his arm and sat up when Nyssa's hand withdrew from pressing the small bandage in place. "You'd be bored with me in a matter of hours, Tegan."

It wasn't the Doctor but Tegan was, in fact, bored for the next several hours. Nyssa and the Doctor had spent it in the lab, testing one thing and another on the nerve and muscle tissues that the young Trakenite had removed. Hoping to contribute something, Tegan had returned to the Console room and replayed the feed from the outside monitors on the Doctor and Nyssa's visit to Gallifrey. The same six guards rotated shifts, none of them coming nearer to the TARDIS than the protective shield would let them in her first few hours of observation. A few guards came and went with the Doctor; the only one who stood out and took her attention was the Castellan, a somewhat stout fellow with a head of curly blond hair and a voice as blustering as she knew hers could be. She was glad she hadn't run across him, they might still be arguing.

And then it came, a few of them had entered the TARDIS, ostensibly searching for the Doctor but at least one of them had been up to something else. These were just the equivalent of palace guards, she reasoned, probably not persons who would act against the Doctor themselves. They had to be working with someone or for someone who had cause to hate the Doctor enough to kill him. She frowned sharply as she froze the feed on those who had entered the Console room that day. Obviously the Doctor hadn't been there or he would've noticed the sabotage to the TARDIS no matter what else was occupying him or if she'd been there, she would have. She wondered how he'd gotten to 900 plus ticking off as many people as he had.

Saving the shot of the guards, including that very loud and blunt Castellan, she started to head back to the lab to see if Nyssa and the Doctor were any closer to an antidote. The inner door opened just as she rounded the side of the Console away from the wall monitor; Nyssa and the Doctor walked into the circular room, both looking somewhat relieved to Tegan's bleary eyes. 

"Well, did you find a cure?"

Nyssa interposed herself between Tegan and the Doctor, as was her usual role, ironically –even unconsciously – protecting him from Tegan's impatient wrath. "Not yet, but we've developed a drug that is much stronger and more effective at keeping most of the symptoms at bay. The Doctor has weeks now before it will become a danger again. We need to get to whoever developed this toxin and hope that they have an antidote."

Tegan's chin came up and she did what she did best after she got through the initial anger, jumped in with both feet and damn the consequences. Her eyes warmed on Nyssa, "Okay, that's great news. We've met worse deadlines," her eyes lifted, "Let's get started."

Still looking a bit worn, he smiled brightly at her, "Indeed, it seems you already have, Tegan. What have you been doing while we were in the lab?" He knew already, he thought, his eyes on the monitor where the Castellan and the guards who had come looking for him were displayed.

"Your last trip to Gallifrey, right? I was scanning the tapes… or whatever you use to keep track of who gets near the TARDIS. That bunch is the only one I've seen get in here. The one with the dark hair has disappeared back near the wall a few times, near where you found that thing. If it was him, I think he must've been working for somebody. Just a guard wouldn't have reason to want to knock you off – probably," she finished with a teasing snap. "Know him?"

The Doctor stared at the dark-haired Gallifreyan for a long moment, recalling centuries of path-crossings and unhappy encounters with his oft-lamented homeworlders. "No, I can't say I do, but as you say, his problem, if he is indeed the culprit, need not have been with me but with some other demon that made him exploitable to someone who already had reason to see me dead… for good." He huffed in an unstrained breath and smiled at the Australian. "We have somewhere to start, at least. I'll contact the Castellan. He's a bit of a blowgut but an honest sort."

"He took you off to be murdered," Tegan growled, dubious.

"Well, we all have our jobs," the Doctor replied lightly and in contrast, in apparent better spirits. "And you have done yours very well, Tegan. I pity whoever has done this when we find them."

Tegan merely scowled anew. "When can you get up with this… Castellan?"

"I shall send him a message and we should hear back in a few hours. For now, I believe all of us should get some rest." The Doctor's hands slid into his pockets and his head suddenly lowered as he faced the two women. "I'm afraid the next few weeks are going to be… somewhat difficult. There is a question I must ask you both, although I already know the answer. There is a substantial chance that I may not survive this trap and I would like to know if you wish to return to Earth. Nyssa, I know that Tegan would help you make a new start there. It's not home but---."

Nyssa raised a hand to silence Tegan, who had begun to take the breath that would lay into a Time Lord from a planet she barely knew existed, who had outlived her by centuries, and who understood a few important secrets of the Universe she didn't know existed. "Doctor, we will not be having this discussion. We are not leaving you to face whoever has done this; they obviously have knowledge that can and has been used against you personally. If something did happen, the TARDIS will take us wherever we need but I am making it clear that there will be absolutely no further talk of us leaving."

Her words, quietly spoken, and in no uncertain terms, were as powerful as if Tegan had been allowed to blast down the walls, something that Tegan seemed to understand as well as he did. She put her arm around Nyssa and hugged her tightly. "That's telling him, Sis." She looked back up at the Doctor with an expression that brooked no argument. "Okay, Silly, you've got your answer. Now send that message and we'll get some rest… **_all_** of us."

Alone in their room, Tegan started to ask Nyssa more about the Doctor's chances and stopped herself. There was no point dragging this out further; the girl needed rest and probably didn't want to think anything more about the challenge they were facing and she certainly already knew she was not alone in her concerns. Tegan opted for bringing them both a cup of hot tea from the galley and settling down with a book on her own bed, one that she had snatched from the vast library aboard the TARDIS, anything that wasn't full of maths and would keep her mind occupied. Nyssa smiled her thanks as Tegan settled down on her own bed.

"What is it your reading?"

"The first book in English without numbers when I went through the door. The place is like a dust collector's dream. Thousands of years ahead of Earth and Gallifreyans don't have robot maids." She opened the huge pinkish covered book and looked at the inside cover, "It's called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", published on Earth in 1998. Gee, talk about your advanced releases."

Nyssa laughed, a sound both of them were glad to hear. "Sounds a bit too much like our real lives."

"Too right," Tegan snapped, "but maybe reading about someone else's adventures will make me feel not so crazy. There's a part of me that can't believe I came back; it spends more time yelling at me than I do anyone else but I'm the only one that can hear it. Kind of like having my own personal Mara back in my head."

Nyssa smiled again. "It seems you've put a great deal into perspective while you were gone, and I must tell you again how glad I am to have you back. The Doctor is a wonderful man but he's hard to share with when it's more than knowledge and having lost so much, I need much from friendship. I was considering leaving myself, but I didn't want him to be alone."

"No, not with the trouble he gets in." Tegan agreed then looked at her friend for a long moment, "He means well, you know. It can't be easy for him to live so long and not be around his own kind who do. And he's a lot more friendly than that first bloke of him I met. I guess saving the Universe is a bit of a distraction. Gotta grade them on a curve under those circumstances."

Nyssa nodded, smiling again as Tegan again picked up the heavy book. "We'll survive this, too. You'll have to share some of that indestructibility with the Doctor."

Tegan hadn't wanted to go there but Nyssa had taken the steps. "If I could… He must be frantic and won't show it. He can't just get a face-lift out of this one. It'll be up to us if this creep gets really nasty, and here I am a air hostess who failed algebra, lost two jobs straight, and know as much about the galaxy as day-old dingo." She shook her head disbelievingly and sighed. "What the hell was on my mind?"

"Fate, Tegan. It wasn't time for you to leave. You're needed here. It was very different without you. He was different, almost wandering in himself as much as the Universe. There… there was no…" the Traken girl's voice trailed off and Tegan looked over to find her asleep with the near empty teacup balanced in her hand. Tegan got up and put it on the nightstand, not having the heart to wake her despite her curiosity. Surely she couldn't have had that great of an effect on the Doctor. Who'd miss someone yelling at them as much as all that?

The next "morning" relative to TARDIS terms came several hours later. The Doctor looked up at the two women as they entered the Console room, Nyssa wearing her usual maroon Traken attire and Tegan in a red sweater and black leather skirt and her ever-impractical shoes. He had once decided she was wearing them to increase her height but then she needed little to get her noticed under most circumstances, especially if she wanted to be heard. Nyssa could, if she chose, fade into a crowd and use her keen mind to observe, while Tegan seemed forever to find herself the center of attention. It was a good pairing in truth, traits that served them well when they needed a diversion and an analysis apart from his own at the same time. His eyes returned to the screen as they flanked him to see what he'd been watching, a countdown timer that told him the return time from a message to Gallifrey.

"If the Castellan has been good about checking his messages, we should know the identity of the guard shortly. They'll have him brought in to custody for questioning, very effective questioning."

Nyssa's head rose and her eyes met his. "You can't mean torture?"

"No, not in the sense that you mean, but the guard isn't a Time Lord, and I am still the Lord President in Abstentia so special measures can be taken. If he doesn't tell what we need to know on his own, he will be scanned telepathically, and he will have no way to resist an interrogator's mind."

Nyssa merely nodded, accepting it for what it was given the fact that this was their best chance to save her friend. Tegan seemed to have reached the same acceptance but her experience with the Mara left her a bit more uncomfortable. "What if he doesn't know anything? I mean, it's pretty circumstantial."

"True," the Doctor answered, shoving his hands deep in his pockets and turning to lean on the Console, "But he'll be given a choice, submit to a low level mind probe that will tell if he has any more knowledge, one that is intrusive and perhaps embarrassing, but not dangerous. If he does have knowledge, he will be given the chance to share it or face a mindprobing that will leave him very little in the way of a mind."

Tegan nodded, satisfied. "Well, it's up to him if he knows anything but if he doesn't, we're back to square one. What then?"

"Always ready to move forward, that's my Tegan." The Doctor smiled engagingly but her expression remained slightly grim and a twinkle of impatience appeared in her eyes. "Well," he continued, "we have two options should he know nothing. I can go back in time and create an observation field outside the TARDIS for the time we were there and I can also ask for medical help from Gallifrey."

Nyssa's eyes suddenly widened, "No, perhaps there are three options. If you can leave her then create an observation field outside the TARDIS, couldn't you also send just the interior of the TARDIS back in time to the correct period and create an observation field on the **_inside_**?"

The Doctor shook his head quickly, "No, I can't. That would corrupt the state of temporal grace inside the TARDIS to the point that it could destabilize completely. We can't move through time and space externally and internally as well, and at the same time maintain an observation field. Three intersecting time events focused on three varied time streams would likely create a state of chronic hysteresis, a time loop, Tegan. The two of you may never realize it but I would be stuck for eternity repeating the same few minutes of time over and over and fully aware of it. I would guess it would take me a few years before I began to go mad." He smiled flittingly for a minute but neither woman smiled in return. "I got caught in one with Romana once but she was a Time Lady so we were able overcome the temporal effects and escape it. I'm afraid neither of you would be able."

They passed the next hour or so in infrequent and idle chat as the Doctor finished returning to the TARDIS to its usual pristine state, one that covered the myriad of glitches that sometimes added unwanted drama to their adventures. For her part Nyssa was going over her notes about the toxin, trying to find any weakness in its molecular composition that they could exploit, and Tegan was sitting in a chair she had dragged into the Console room so as not to miss anything, her nose buried in the book she had retrieved from the library. It was heavy and resting in her leathered lap. The Doctor noticed the rate at which she was turning pages with some amazement and was about to ask what she was reading when the comm-alarm went off, followed by a loud slap from the deck as Tegan missed in her attempt to grab the book as she stood. She glanced down but didn't bother to retrieve it as they gathered around the screen.

It was not, however, the ruddy, stout Castellan but someone else, a thin humanoid with a bluish cast to his narrow face and eyebrows that were thin streaks upon his eyes and wrapped around into his thinning, dark hair. His mouth was little more than a slit and pointed white teeth showed through it when he finally spoke, his voice a thin whisper that carried a tone of impatience. "This took much longer than I thought."

The Doctor drew himself up and pushed Tegan and Nyssa away from him slightly. "Who are you?"

The man sat back a bit in what looked like a small throne, the angle of his transmitter widening. "I am called the CareTaker by most. My name is Aquintal Miros. You, Doctor, may call me, perhaps, savior."

Ignoring the Doctor's warning hand, Nyssa moved closer. "You are responsible for the Doctor being poisoned."

"Yes, of course."

Nyssa glared and fell silent and The CareTaker nodded once. "I have my reasons. You'll learn them and what I require when you arrive, Doctor. In brief, I need a task done for which only a Time Lord is suited, and so few leave Gallifrey that I had no choice in selecting you. My only other alternative was the Master and his assistance, while forcible, would result only in retributions on a far greater scale than the disaster I am hoping to undo and prevent. I am not, despite what you think and feel, an evil man, merely one with no options."

Tegan took her turn, unstoppable once breath had been taken. "Oh, that's a shame. Don't any of you in the Psycho of the Week club have any loyalty to one another?"

A gleam appeared in The Caretaker's utterly black eyes as they focused on her. "From my observations of Gallifrey, I know Miss Nyssa, but who are you?"

Tegan's voice dropped, her accent thickened, and she took a step slightly in front of the Doctor even as he reached to stop her. "Me? I'm Trouble."

"Really? Then you will also be of help." The Caretaker raised himself up in the tall-backed chair. "I have sent coordinates. Succeed, Doctor, and you will have the antidote to the toxin in a matter of days. I am confident that Miss Nyssa has already seen to it that you have that long. I made certain there were some weaknesses in the formula, but none that would render it useless without my allowing it. I will expect you in a few hours, Doctor, Miss Nyssa,… Trouble."

The comm went dead and the screen faced to black. It took a moment before any of the three spoke. It was Tegan, furious and with nothing yet to direct her anger. "Oh, he'd better be expecting real trouble and not just playing with words."

The Doctor, after a glance at the screen on the Console, couldn't help but smile at her. "I'm sure what he's not playing with is, what do you Humans say… a full deck."

"I'm glad you can joke," she snapped, her eyes going back to the blank screen.

The Doctor turned from her to look somewhat resignedly at Nyssa, "Well, it seems we now have that third alternative. Do send a message to the Castellan, tell him that we may have a solution and will be delayed, if we arrive at all. I wonder if it's still a trap if you know it's a trap when you're walking into it." The Doctor looked between both women again; Tegan met his eyes firmly when they fell on her and held them.

"He's already sprung the trap, Doc. He needs you for something. The same time we got a third alternative, we ended up not having any choices at all."

The Doctor took a slow, slightly tight breath as he regarded the human woman, his blue eyes focusing his soul on the comforting slow fury he found there. "You know, of all the forces in the Universe, I think I hate irony the most."


	4. Chapter 4

CH. 4

The time passed slowly, the clocks in the minds of those occupying the TARDIS ticking away as regularly as the alien mechanisms at the heart of the timeship itself. It dragged until the Doctor stepped back up to the Console after hours of making a tedious and typically unproductive attempt at repairing the chameleon circuit. In the end he seemed to have damaged it more before giving up, just a few minutes before it was time to materialize. Tegan and Nyssa came flying in moments after he announced that they were nearly over their destination. He wanted to look around a moment before materializing into the already sprung trap. All the times he'd been manipulated before, centuries of them, had been running through his mind, along with all the times he'd barely escaped, and if he didn't this time, what Fate awaited his two companions he had no way of knowing. Just as surely, he knew there was nothing he could do bar locking them in the TARDIS that would prevent them from joining him. He didn't know what he'd done to deserve their loyalty; he just hoped that neither he nor they came to regret it.

The scanner mounted high in the wall came to life as they left the time-stream. On it was the bleakest world any of them, the Time Lord included, had ever seen. It was a moon, a moon of black and dark gray crags, sharp and ravenous, untouched by the grinding winds of an atmosphere. Even the side facing the sun seemed bleak as if space itself had coagulated into a cold and angry mass. It was Tegan who spoke first, turning her eyes away from the coalish mass and setting her book down on the Console. "Let me guess, we won't have to worry about crowds of tourists. There can't be any air on that thing? Are we supposed to go inside it or in some sort of … oh, there I guess."

"Precisely, Tegan," the Doctor agreed, his eyes on the large metal and crystalline dome that had rotated into view as they hung above the planetoid. "Welcome to Ecosia Beta. Her primary is much more attractive but nevertheless not our destination. Perhaps we can visit later. I'm sure we'll need a rest."

Nyssa looked down at the screens on the Console, dreading being on the dark worldlet already. "Well, the atmosphere inside is breathable for all of us, actually a slightly higher oxygen content than any of our home worlds. Of course, the gravity is slightly less but there are power readings inside the dome that may come from artificial gravity generators..."

Tegan joined her, "What is it they do down there? Mine something or, given our luck, build weapons? Why would they need a Time Lord? The place looks abandoned."

The Doctor's muffled voice answered her as his head remained down, his rigid arms straddling the side of the Console he was on across from them. "I believe I know why, and this CareTaker is right, he's got a mess on his hands that only a Time Lord could undo." He looked up at them for a moment and then went back to the screen, his breathing audible, his teeth gritted behind his thrust out lower lip.

Nyssa moved around to him swiftly, before Tegan could explode and to prevent the Doctor from being alone with the details any longer than necessary, her scientific mind planting its feet and hoping to shield them all. "What's down there?"

The Doctor straightened; his hands remained clenched as the lifted off the metal Console. "A T.I.F. – an unstable one." Nyssa and Tegan both looked at him with edgy patience and he backtracked, "A Temporal Initiation Field. You see, in order to travel in time, you must first briefly stop it, a process in a TARDIS that takes nothing more than an instant; it's done as an automatic function of beginning to dematerialize, one that's built in. It's so automatic that I never bothered to speak of it when I was showing Nyssa how to operate the controls. In races just beginning to time travel, it's the first step. Once you stop time for that instant in which you exist, then you can select which time stream to enter to go when you want."

Tegan moved to join them on the Doctor's other side, "So what's this idiot done to muck it up?"

"Well, I can't tell how he did it yet, but the field is fluctuating, time is stopping and starting and backtracking inside of it. The chamber it's contained in is no doubt affected but given the extremely long and inactive life-span of an airless moon that isn't a problem for the moon itself at the moment."

Nyssa adjusted the scanner to show a beautiful blue and gold world, one that resembled Earth except for the fact that the oceans were much more dominant. Only two large landmasses were present and no trace of pollution showed in the atmosphere. "What about the planet, if the field collapses or ruptures, what then?"

The Doctor pressed a few more keys and switches then huffed, not straining to breathe but in frustration at all the fools who tried to move about in time before they were ready. "Well, nothing if the field ruptures, the effect will dissipate and pollute space with chronimitic waves but the time rift will heal itself. However, if the field collapses, it will cause time to fold inward upon itself and likely take the moon with it, causing it to essentially vanish."

"And that's the bad thing, right?" Tegan interjected.

The Doctor nodded, "Very bad. It will destabilize the orbit of Ecosia, probably badly enough that it will be thrown out of orbit and into its sun without the counterbalance of Ecosia Beta affecting its orbit. It would also be unmercifully slow."

Tegan scowled and looked at the beautiful blue planet, inevitably thinking of home. "And I assume it's populated. There's bound to be life down there."

"There is indeed, our CareTaker is Ecosian himself. He may have moved his operations here to keep the planet safe but he still had no idea the forces he was tapping. Small wonder Gallifrey keeps such tight rein on who is permitted such power; even I understand their thinking in that regard. They begin to think they'll have their own history as a playground, or at best be able to have the chance to observe, never realizing the consequences of … untrained interference. Many races have learned the avenues to achieve time travel but only Time Lords have taken the next step, to understand the rami---." He trailed off, looking at the weary and worry on the faces of his two young companions. Both were watching him with patience and almost clinical concern, an expression new and strange on Tegan's part. He smiled thinly and rested a hand on their shoulders, "Still, time is what our present problem is, for Ecosia, and for me it seems. I suppose we should make our arrival known."

If anything, Ecosia Beta was worse from the ground, a dismal and craggy blotch on the Universe whose only beauty was to be found above, looking into a sky brilliant with stars and a view of the blue and gold planet. The fact that the only beauty was so far away made the little planetoid seem all the more wretched. Still, it had its worth, serving to hold its primary to an orbit where life had evolved and beauty existed. There would not be one without the other. The Doctor looked up at the sky but then found himself following the struts of the dome from their massive apex two kilometers overhead to where the nearest met the rock face below. Since the facility was not visible from the surface, it must be concealed within the moon itself. Tunnels, more tunnels, rock-strewn, narrow, and certainly dark. The Doctor's eyes fell to Tegan's shoes and widened in slight relief when he saw that she had found a pair that were designed to support and protect her feet and not display them.

The Doctor had issued them each a key before they had left the TARDIS, one that Tegan was sorely tempted to use as they increased their distance from the time ship, seeking an entrance into the rock face. This tiny planet reminded her of nothing more than a horror movie waiting to happen. She suddenly wanted a weapon even if she didn't know what to fight. She stopped when the Doctor did, before a large gray door that had no markings and could only be told from the rock once you were within a few feet of it. Glancing at both his companions, the Doctor knocked on the rough metal surface and wondered if it would even be heard on the other side. No other signaling device was apparent.

Nor was one apparently needed. More chilling than if it had squealed and groaned, the doorway opened silently onto a corridor that seemed comparatively bright to their light-starved eyes. Tiny floor lights marked the corridors beyond the opening. Three of them led outward into unknown depths, one center, one angled to their left, and another to the right. The Doctor took a step forward and stopped as the two women immediately moved with him. He turned to face them and then looked at the ground, his hands suddenly burying themselves in his pockets. "I have no doubt that door will swing shut the moment we pass it. I want you both to consider very carefully what facing this man could----."

"We are not having this conversation," Tegan snapped, her echoing vehemence surprising herself as much as the Doctor. "This is our choice; you are not responsible, right, Nyssa?"

"Absolutely," the younger woman answered, her head rising as she gave the Doctor the look she had learned from her mother while serving at the court. The Doctor stared at her hard for several moments, suddenly forced to recall that this was a woman of regal upbringing, trained to wield authority from birth. That Traken no longer existed did not diminish what her training to rule it had given her. Those were traits often subsumed by her intellectual accomplishments but ones that were just as much a part of her character when called upon, traits that could dress down a Time Lord with a look.

The Doctor backed down slowly, pulling his hands free and keeping Tegan and Nyssa close as they entered the dimly lit expanse. Deep within, in a place he would never admit existed, the place within him that drove him to have others close, one not affected by his training in emotional detachment, he desperately wanted them to go with him, wanted to hear the short but brutal lecture he'd just been given.

The lights of the left corridor began flashing as they reached the center of the juncture and they turned to follow them without a word of comment. The darkness swallowed them after a few minutes walk but a few minutes more brought them into a large circular room, one filled with consoles along the sides and rows and rows of seats, a small natural amphitheatre cut into the dark stone. It was polished to a fine sheen here where the few lights struck it, coming from the occasional console that gave up its information to an operator long vanished, a history of absence told by a fine fuzz of dust. At the far end of the room was an elevated platform, and upon it, in the chair they had seen on the TARDIS viewscreen, sat their cold and uninviting host.

Acquintal Miros raised his hands in a parody of welcome but none of those who had joined him responded in any way but to stop their approach and wait for him to speak. His dust-blue tunic went well with his skin; his legs were covered by a pair of black and gray breeches. The woven tunic he wore protected him from the chill of the coming night. The CareTaker sat forward slightly and beckoned the three aliens closer, his gaze on the Time Lord increasingly intent.

"Welcome to Ecosia Beta."

"Spare us," the taller of the two women snapped. The Time Lord opened his mouth for a moment, seeming about to rebuke her, and then apparently decided that she had expressed the feelings of all of them quite well. He stepped forward, hands in the pockets of his striped trousers and chin thrust at Miros.

"Yes, do spare us. What is it you want of me exactly? I've already detected your incompetent attempt at creating a departure matrix. Even you rank amateurs must realize the fluctuations are a simple enough thing to fix if you've built the equipment to create one; you simply allow it to rupture and send a few particles forward through time and it will undo itself. The chronomitic waves are highly toxic but have a very brief lifespan. That being the case, I can only assume you've got some sort of complication that requires a Time Lord. Out with it."

Much to their surprise, unlike any of the other maniacal figures they had encountered, this one suddenly looked resigned, embarrassed, and chastised. Miros folded his hands in his long lap. "You are right, Doctor, and it is a personal complication, and the reason why I had to make the undoing of this as important to you as it is to me. It had to mean your life, your lives, because it means all that made mine worthwhile."

Nyssa folded her arms, striking the Doctor as remarkably like Tegan. "Go on."

Miros lifted his eyes and his chin where they had dropped to face his lap. He met their gazes as if daring them to judge him, knowing they already had. If it were not for his hold on the Time Lord's life they would have cursed him as having earned his fate, all of their fates, and left. That was how business worked. One only trusted family unless one had power. "Eight months ago, we made the first test here, activated the departure matrix for the first time. It was an event unlike any other in our history, one that we were celebrating with the world."

Miros looked at the expressionless faces of the Doctor and the two females, not entirely expressionless on the part of the taller one. She seemed patiently waiting for the right moment to tear his head off. Perhaps if the Doctor failed, he would let her. "The families of all the researchers and theorists were there, and my family as the owners of this moon and the satellite power generators that feed the project. My family was the first to witness the activation, on an observation platform in the chamber that was to hold the departure matrix. When the alarms began, the matrix spread quickly before it could be contained but not so quickly that nearly everyone was able to escape before we increased the power keeping it within the chamber."

The Doctor scowled and then rolled forward on his feet. "Your family is trapped, I assume, and the field will soon have a range of temporal flux that will wipe them from existence unless someone who can safely enter the flux can anchor and retrieve them, a Time Lord, of course. You know, if you are aware of my travels and involvements, it would have been apparent to you that I would have helped you… if… you had simply asked."

Miros looked at him for a moment and then turned away, not meeting the steel and cobalt gaze. "I know your kind, not you, Doctor. The most likely thing a Time Lord would do is force the field to rupture, spare the lives of the many if they interfered at all, and let me deal with the consequences, the deaths of my family. I built all I have for them; they are all that matters, and if a Time Lord was all that could save them, a Time Lord is what I shall have!" His voice had risen and he had come to the edge of the tall, heavy chair, and had worked his nerve up to look at the Time Lord again.

The tension hung in the air for several moments, the Doctor the one to become resigned this time, "And if I'm successful?"

A glimmer of light caught the attention of the three off-worlders, a transmat beam flickering to their right, bringing into existence a small vial of green liquid in a shielded container, complete with a containment lock. It now lay on a console just to their right, along with a set of what looked like thin silver bars. "Your cure, Doctor. The antidote to the poison is in the container but it is shielded against chemical scans to prevent you from learning the structure and openable only by the DNA of my wife. Free her and she will free you."

Tegan had heard enough, her face flushed and angry, she stepped even with the Doctor. "Fine, how do we get started? Where is this chamber?"

A flicker of cold regret came into the eyes of the Ecosian. "In the only place we could safely build it in case of a problem with the chain of fusion reactors, approximately 70 kilometers within the core of this moon. It may take you several days to reach it."

"Days?" Tegan replied, growing more cross. "That's ridiculous. The TARDIS can have us there is sec ---."

"Tegan," the Doctor interrupted, "he has no intention of letting us return to the TARDIS."

"One of us must go back," Nyssa interrupted in turn, her cold gaze on the Ecosian. "The temporary antidote I've created for the Doctor will give him more than sufficient time to do what you've demanded but it must be administered regularly and the supply of it is back aboard the TARDIS."

Miros balked but only for a moment. "Then you go, and go alone, bring back what you need. Along the way your necessities will be provided for your journey; it becomes quite cold here at night as you might imagine. You will find crew quarters available to you using the codekeys there next to the antidote. The quarters have been sealed, even the…," he paused, "even the survivors have not been able to enter them."

The Doctor rounded on the seated Ecosian, his eyes tearing away from the container that held the drug that would assumedly release him from a permanent death sentence. "Survivors? What do you mean?"

"Those who didn't make it to the transports. They have been affected by the bleed off of radiation that happened during the initial failure. We contained the radiation, neutralized it, and tried to rescue the workers affected but some of them were made mentally unstable, animalistic as their higher brains decayed. They fled into the depths of the base, knowing it so well that they were able to remain hidden. All of them have gone quite mad by now. We transmat food here for them and have tried to lure them out to be caught and brought to medical facilities but have been unsuccessful in capturing many of them. At best they have weeks or months more; I have provided weapons for you to deal with them."

The transmat sparkled again and on the table a pile of promised supplies appeared, few since they would apparently have the crew quarters available to them, mostly foodstuffs they could consume while moving and the weapons. Tegan edged behind the Doctor's broad back and eyed the silver and black pistols and holsters out of sight of Miros, figuring out what she believed the controls to be. The Doctor started to turn, wondering what she was doing; she made her move, dodging to snatch up the nearest of the guns. She leveled it at Miros with a steady hand. "You must've had your wife's DNA to program that thing. Open it. The Doctor will still help you."

Tegan looked up when the Doctor closed on her and rested a hand on her tight shoulder, the one raising the gun. "Don't bother, Tegan. Save your energy."

She glanced away from the Ecosian long enough to see a look of Universe-weary surrender on the Doctor's face. "You know I'm right."

"You are, Tegan. Your deduction about the DNA is certainly correct but Miros would not have provided weapons if we were able to turn them against him."

"What do you mean?"

The Doctor shrugged, his hands pulling from his trousers. "Go on, shoot." He smiled thinly, "It might make you feel better. It might even make me feel better."

Miros watched their exchange benignly. "Send the girl Nyssa back to retrieve what she needs but if more than one of you attempts to leave, I will seal the doors and you will have no way to use the antidote. Until you are ready to leave to free my family, its container will remain sealed against the surface of the table."

Tegan glared at the Ecosian again and after a quick glance at the Time Lord, pulled the trigger on the gun, her shot aimed at Miros's leg. She struck it square, the blue bolt passing through his knee… and leaving no trace of its passing except for the puff of smoke from the woodlike material of the chair. She stared for a moment and then lowered the weapon. "He's a projection? When did you know?"

"As I said, Tegan, when he provided us a means of defending ourselves. Do pay attention. He also hasn't made a threat he cannot carry out so I suppose we're in for a bit of a hike." He turned to look at Nyssa as she retrieved one of the three guns for herself, taking it distastefully but steadily.

"I'll be back shortly, Doctor, and yes, I will be careful. "


	5. Chapter 5

CH. 5

Silence took Nyssa's place in the room, affecting even Tegan as she sat down on one of the consoles that had been deactivated. The cold the Doctor had warned them off had made her opt for a dark blue sweater and a pair of gray woolen pants and sensible black shoes. The part of her that looked the most familiar was therefore the scowl directed at the empty chair in which Acquintal Miros had seemed to be seated. She stood and poked at the live console next to the dead one, which seemed to be displaying a rotating schematic of at least a portion of the complex. A pulsing icon glowed white on the upper left of the screen at the far end of what seemed to be a network of corridors, to a room on the diagram that was roughly shaped like this one. Tegan rightly guessed that it was the quadrant that contained the nearest fusion reactor. On an impulse, she touched the second of the four red buttons underneath the display. Another set of corridors and another pulsing white icon for a generator appeared, this time in the opposite corners. The next two buttons provided similar views but they also produced something else, an occasional blue light that went from one corridor to the next and vanished.

Tegan had a suspicious and therefore familiar feeling in her gut as the figures appeared and vanished, furtive and quick, seeming almost to avoid one another. "Doctor?"

"I'm right here," he said quietly, oppressed by the architecture and the situation. The worries that had been vague before were now becoming concrete. His death sentence still loomed and now he had once again been forced to bring his companions into harm's way. He had turned the situation over in his mind a thousand times and always come up with the same conundrums. He needed both of them now, not merely because of the poisoning but because if he did not survive nor would they, or an entire world of beings who likely had no idea there was any danger. He took a moment to envy those Time Lords in whom emotional detachment had completely taken root. He supposed it was the fact that his mother was human that he'd never been fully able to achieve it and the Galaxy therefore never seemed to tire of obligating him to solve its problems or to amuse it. Drawing his attention back to the scanner, he took his turn watching the scurrying blue lights. He took a step back from Tegan and sat down on the nearest dead control panel.

Tegan had stopped herself from staring at him, wondering what he had been ruminating about in the long moments after he had joined her and then moved away so abruptly. "It's them, isn't it? Those poor souls who went mad from being around this matrix thing that went wrong. They're searching for food, hiding from each other, living like caged animals."

The Doctor nodded. "Yes, I believe you're right. It's a definite map of the base. They show up when they are in areas not needing shielding for scientific experiments."

"Is there radiation down there?" She asked, the first note of doubt in her voice. On this point, at least, he would be able to reassure her.

"No, not in any dangerous manner. Fusion doesn't produce radiation of a dangerous sort to us and the chronomitic particles that are affecting them are something that your time in the TARDIS will protect you from. Every living thing that enters the TARDIS enters into a state of temporal grace, time stops for it while we're actually moving through time. Your aware of time's passage save on a biomolecular level and the residue of that effect will give you an immunity to the chronomitic forces. As a Time Lord they are made part of my own genetics."

A sudden honest smile lit Tegan's face. "You mean as long as I'm in the TARDIS, I won't age?"

"Well, while the TARDIS is in motion, no. When we make planetfall or land elsewhere that's a different circumstance. Why? We're you planning on having me return to Earth and then selling rides on the TARDIS as a cosmetic treatment?" He smiled gamely and moved closer to her again, taking the warm seat where she had been several moments ago. Tegan stared at him and then laughed after a moment, the sound echoing in the shining gray room.

"I might be better selling cosmetic time travel than being a stewardess."

The Doctor smiled again, enjoying a brief respite from the dread. "I was meaning to ask you exactly how you got… what was it… sacked?"

Tegan shrugged and leaned against the active terminal, her back to the scampering blue figures and the fusion reactor. Genuine anger suddenly tainted her voice as she told the tale. "Well, if you must know – and really I don't mind telling you - , I got sacked for using "inappropriate force against a fellow crew member".

"Ah, that's my Tegan. And they deserved it, I have no doubt."

Tegan looked down at him for a moment and realized his voice lacked any trace of sarcasm. "Let's just say I ruined a certain captain's perfect record for recruits to the mile-high club."

The Doctor stared at her, "You didn't cause the plane to go down?"

Tegan stared back; sometimes what he didn't know caught her as off-guard as what he did; she then grinned wickedly for a moment, "Not the one we were riding in," she quipped, and moved on quickly before the Doctor's still unenlightened gaze drove her to a fit of inappropriate giggles. "Anyway, he didn't get what he wanted, and I got fired in Amsterdam with a severance ticket home and my final check to show for it. I was going to the airline the next day to file a complaint when the next thing I knew, I was back in the middle of another fine mess with you!"

The Doctor lowered his head and smiled, "But then there was no one better to face it. I do regret that I have made you a target."

Tegan shrugged and buried her fingers between her arms and her ribs. "I guess it was meant to be, Doc. After all, your timing was perfect – for once – and I hadn't felt alive since… well, the last time I was running for my life. I'm an adrenalin junkie with the Universe at my disposal and when I do go back to Earth and become dotty I'll have the best delusions in the retirement home."

They were still laughing when Nyssa returned, carrying a fair-sized parcel. "Sorry it took so long," she offered as the unloaded the pack she was carrying. "I wanted to divide up the drug so that if anything happened to any one of us there would still be a supply. I also retrieved three thermal blankets, a bioscanner, a medical kit, perimeter sensors, and a few other things. Do we have any idea where we should start?"

The Doctor took the parcel from her and examined the contents for a moment then looked toward the door. "One would assume he would like to make things easy. It shouldn't be too hard to find the path."

"If he wanted to make things easy," Tegan countered, "wouldn't he want us to have the TARDIS to get there?"

They were out in the hallway before he answered, seeking some sort of directional help as they approached the first juncture. The Doctor was fairly certain of the right path from his brief look at the schematics Tegan had found. "It depends," he began. (It took Tegan a moment to catch that he was answering her.) "They know very little about time travel and may be assuming not only would we take the chance to depart and see how I might fair with medical help from Gallifrey but that the TARDIS itself would be a threat to the unstable mess they've made."

"Could it?" Nyssa replied.

"Not unless they've done something truly stupid. In fact, there is a chance the TARDIS could be a stabilizing influence but we'd be wasting time to attempt that argument on --- Ah, I believe we have our guidance." All three of them could now see the slowly brightening lights in the corridor just to the right; the Doctor, however, was able to see it first. They moved into it slowly, glancing with agitation at the darkness that the selective lighting left elsewhere.

Another thought struck Tegan as she fingered the holster on her hip; she had taken two weapons when the Doctor, of course, had waved his away. "If this character knows where we're going, he can probably see us, too."

The Doctor, just behind her, smiled tightly. "Probably. Instead of a captive audience, he has captive performers but then I'd watch me, too. I've been known to be a very dangerous character."

The attempt at humor, uttered in the thin light, fell short on Tegan's ears. Her hand went to the gun again and she shifted the holster into a more comfortable position on her hip. She had thrown the other one over her head and under her left shoulder. It was awkward but manageable and it made her feel slightly better. She dreaded the thought of having to use them but once again, they'd been given little choice and she hadn't hesitated when it had come down to her or the Cybermen who had attempted to destroy the Earth. She thought of Adric, of course, and sighed to herself. Damn him for being so smart, anyway, he'd probably figured it out and run back at the last minute or something.

They walked in silence for nearly two hours, their dimly lit path toward the center of Ecosia Beta varying little in the outer perimeters. The Doctor had explained that the corridors would become more angular and serpentine as they neared the reactors and the temporal core, a means of dulling the effect of any explosion that might channel through them. As they moved it became increasingly cooler but their activity served well enough to keep them warm and the enviro-controls had been kept functioning due to the survivors eking out their horrific existence. They often passed what a glimpse through the windows in the door had proven to be the promised crew quarters. Nyssa had tried the coded passkey and it had opened all of the ones they'd tested. If nothing else, Miros had lived up to his word so far. They stopped at one their third hour into the long trip to freshen up and grab a few bites of the nutrient bars provided. They were surprised to find them quite palatable.

Nyssa wiped the dust off her fingers as she pulled open a cupboard and waved the bioscanner at the contents, then did the same to the freezer unit in the kitchen area as Tegan stood next to her. "All the food is consumable by all of us. Ecosians must be one of the offshoot races, although carbon is unique in its abilities to serve as a basis for life-forms. Mathematically it stands to reason that a great percentage of life-forms would be able to share consumables." She met Tegan's dark eyes for a moment and looked down at the scanner sharply. Tegan followed her gaze and feigned interest in what Nyssa was saying because it was giving the young Trakenite a chance to aim the device at the Doctor who was seated in the small living area behind them and scanning a few of the technical manuals slowly gathering their own dust.

"Great, the next nice planet we go to we'll get the Doc' to take us to the finest restaurant it has and have a blast. Any suggestions, Nyss?"

"We'll leave that up to the Doctor. I'm sure he knows several of them." She shut the scanner off and slipped it back in her pocket. Nyssa had also changed clothes for their journey. She was wearing a dark green sweater and tan trousers, along with the requisite comfortable shoes. Both of the women were beginning to be a bit footsore but Tegan at least was still enjoying the benefits of having left her heels behind.

Having heard them, the Doctor stood and raked a hand through his sun blond hair, practically the only show of brightness in the dark room whose walls were the stone of the moon itself. "I have to admit, I used to be quite the connoisseur in my third incarnation. I was restricted to Earth for much of it so I developed a great appreciation for Earth's cuisine. Sorry not to be more exotic Tegan, but I think I can find something a little more distant when the time comes."

Tegan smiled thinly, "Make it up to me once we're off nutrition bars on a daily basis."

"I'd be overjoyed to do so, but having spoken of time…," he gestured toward the door, a slight nod only but they were ready to proceed. Another few hours of walking lay ahead of them before they would allow themselves to recharge. Nyssa shouldered the bag with the blankets and the Doctor turned his back on them and headed out, taking for granted they were moving after him, understandably distracted and glancing back only when they had shut the door. Despite being the one best armed (Nyssa was wearing her own weapon although it brought her far less comfort) Tegan hung back as they moved onward in the quasi-darkness of the carved tunnels. She was never going to wear gray or black again after they got out of this. "So - how is he?" She barely mouthed, knowing the Doctor would hear her otherwise.

Nyssa moved closer to her to do the same, hoping she was comprehensible since her answer would be more complicated. "Nearly the same but the drug had to be designed specifically to protect the thoracic muscles. I – we didn't have time create a more broad spectrum formula. It's adapting almost like a virus, attacking him in other ways. There is a residual effect on his remaining muscles beginning, cramping, some vascular constriction. As long as we're moving it'll stave off the effects but we'll eventually have to stop ourselves and the Doctor will also tire more easily."

"Can't you give him anything?" Tegan responded, her voice barely more than the movement of her lips.

"There was no time to develop a total counteragent. It should be tolerable for him long enough to do what we need to do. It just means we'll have to travel shorter distances and rest for briefer periods. I'll talk to him when we stop."

Tegan nodded and squeezed the younger woman's arm before she moved forward, amazed by her knowledge and grateful. The Doctor looked down as Tegan drew even with him. She said nothing but he noted the set of her jaw and how her eyes never stopped moving. The dim light made them seem larger and deeper. He wondered not for the first time what in her life had so tempered her steel. Obviously events long before she had stumbled into the TARDIS had brought about her shrewdness and determination, either difficulties or a solid upbringing. He certainly hoped it was the latter. Unscientific she might be, but Tegan was as sharp as they came on many other levels and Nyssa as sharp on the rest. If he survived this, it would be due to them both. Before them, the darkness beckoned, welcoming, cruel, and relentless, only the hope at its end driving them on…


	6. Chapter 6

Four hours of featureless, dim corridors later they finally stopped, weary and dull witted. The crew quarters that opened for them were dusty but otherwise well-stocked and kept. Each was designed to hold four staffers, their necessities, and a few personal items. The one they had been in before had obviously been one that was unoccupied previously. This one was decorated with a sea motif and bright blue paint covered the walls when they found the light switches.

Tegan sighed with relief as a color other than gray filled her vision. "Finally! I thought I was going to go berserk if I had to stare into nothing any longer, waiting for a madman to leap out."

Nyssa stepped back in the large blue room. "Well, I can reassure you on the second part as well. I've set up a perimeter scanner to warn us if any of these beings approach. I suspect they're mostly down toward where the reactors are and it's warmer but the doors here seal as well."

Seated on the sofa, having seemed preoccupied with trying to get the small personal computer on the end table there to work, the Doctor looked up from its flickering screen. "I agree. It's a bit cold here. Oh, and Tegan, speaking of the lack of color, did you know that a common form of mental torture is to place someone in an area with no contrasting color? The mind loses perspective eventually. Of course, it's most effective done in a small space and while one is forced to remain stationary, then the brain has no other means to … uhm, eh, is there a thermostat in here?"

"I'll find it," Nyssa volunteered. As much as she was chilled, it gave her a chance to move about the room and have the Doctor's back to her.

Tegan looked about for the thermostat as well but was mostly moving about in the kitchenette area, looking for something that seemed edible and didn't come in foil pack. "So, Doc', I _was_ being driven bonkers by the sameness of it all?"

"Just a bit. The lights help but the monotony of the journey and our exhaustion also have to do with --, "he stopped. Looking up at the heating panel with a broad smile as warmth began to radiate out from it. "Thank you, Nys---," he stopped talking as he began to turn around and saw the bioscanner focused on him. "Well, _Doctor_?" He smiled quickly but the young woman did not.

"The toxin is adapting almost as a virus would," she began, and then laid out for him, in far more technical terms than she had with Tegan, the difficulties she believed he would begin encountering now that they had stopped. He accepted all of it with a resigned sigh and a new determination, watching absently as Tegan finally succeeded in getting the microwave oven to work. There were a few of them on Earth in her time and something very like it aboard the TARDIS. She had succeeded a bit more quickly with the water heating unit, and was sniffing at the contents of several jars of what seemed very much like tea.

They had a passable meal, one that did as much to restore them as nutrition could and the heater had taken the chill out of the air. The alleviation of the darkness helped more than anything to restore what could be restored of their spirits and neither Tegan or Nyssa moved to turn the lights off when they both finally headed for the room that held two sturdily built, extra-wide bunk beds. They had each visited the washroom in the very back of the living unit, which contained not only facilities but also a clothing refresher similar to the one in the TARDIS. Nyssa prepared to climb into the top bunk when she returned from the bath, unsurprised to find Tegan already asleep and the Doctor giving the appearance of being so. Her last act before settling down to sleep herself was to set an alarm on the bioscanner that would alert her if the Doctor's condition worsened abruptly. He had stripped off his fawn-colored coat and lay seemingly peacefully on the lower bunk across the narrow room from Tegan. Accepting that there was little else she could do, Nyssa let herself fall into a restless sleep, too tired and worried to properly rest for the first hour or so.

The next "morning" was a revisit of irony. They ate quickly and headed back out into the darkness of the interior of the moon. Only a few minutes travel brought them the evidence that the scientists and maintenance crew who had been affected by the unstable time field had been near during the night. The remains of a meal lay in a spread out pile, the bones of some sort of large bird that had been part of what had been transported down, bones that had been disturbingly gnawed upon. An hour later they came upon the first body. It was not a fresh kill but at least a month old. In the darkness they could see the withered form in the shreds of a light gray uniform. Several of its ribs were broken and a leg was missing for reasons none of them cared to speculate on. Even the Doctor seemed uninclined to investigate. Tegan hugged the guns more tightly to herself and tried harder to peer into the grayness before and behind them, lit by the will of their captor to guide them toward the family only a Time Lord could free.

Several times over the next few hours they could hear the distant noises of something moving about, echoing through the tubular stone walls and impossible to gauge as far as distance. One was close enough for Tegan to fire several warning shots into the darkness off to their right, aimed high to avoid the chance she might kill the tortured souls who wandered, mad, through the seemingly endless darkness. Tegan wondered if the lights, such as they were, tiny things that lined the floor and a thin strip on the apex of the ceiling, were normally left on but had been shut down elsewhere so that they could serve as a guide for their journey. She felt a pang of sympathy for the beings forced into a craven existence here but knew they were as trapped as any of them and before the Doctor could help anyone else, he had to help himself.

The first full day of their journey was proving much like their first spent on the dim trail, save for the occasional more frequent skitterings and guttural utterances in the distance. The Doctor was walking more slowly than normal, just behind Tegan and using his keener eyesight to look over her head. Nyssa, still shouldering the pack, was beside him, unable to stop running through the potential variances on the drug she and the Doctor had created, to find the right combination of elements that would break the grip of the poison. She remembered what Professor Imiras, the teacher she had learned the most from had drilled into her head, and brought up the question that had been in the back of her mind from the start.

"Doctor, how did he get Time Lord DNA to develop this toxin? The Gallifrey I remember was like a fortress, almost completely immune from outside interference. And these people barely have the basic concepts of time travel down; how could they have developed a toxin so effective against you?"

The Doctor looked down at her as they walked; the same questions had obviously been occurring to him but events had precluded their having the discussion. "Well, if Ecosians, after having noticed me, in their observations of my comings and goings, kept track of the worlds I've visited, there would have been medical records of mine other than on Gallifrey, particularly Earth. What they lack in temporal knowledge, they may well have in genetic engineering. When Earth had barely gotten a space station in orbit, they had already begun developing drugs based on genetics and cloning everything up to and including primates. In any case, I've gotten knocked about a bit over the centuries and occasionally found myself incapacitated. Once he determined I was the only one to leave Gallifrey enough to be useful, it would've taken only a few inquiries to determine where else a Time Lord had been and anything that might've happened that would've produced a medical record of some sort, even one incomprehensible to someone taking it."

Tegan glanced back at him, sparing her gaze for a moment from the trail before them. "It's not like you know how to keep a low profile, is it?"

The Doctor smiled tightly. "Drawing attention to oneself, Tegan, is hardly an area where you yourself are lacking," he responded and Tegan couldn't help but smile after a moment.

"Point taken," she admitted and shared a guilty smile with Nyssa. "In any case, I haven't got---." A noise somewhere between a shriek and a howl cut her off, one much closer than any of the others they had heard before now. Tegan pulled the energy pistol from its holster but simply held it pointed at the ceiling, unable to tell if the noise had come from before or behind them. It had been a good half hour since they had passed the last intersection of corridors. They backed against the right hand wall so as not to have their backs open to either direction and waited for several tense minutes. They heard nothing more but Tegan once again fired several bright green warning shots into the air, high toward the ceiling, ahead of and behind them. Having nothing else they could do, they continued to move forward, following the strings of lights deeper into the dark moon.

Another hour went by before they again heard an anonymous noise in the darkness, something that sounded between humanoid and animal, a grating, throbbing howl. Tegan pulled the gun again and Nyssa was tugged closer by the Doctor. "The sound had a much lower pitch. Whatever poor soul is making it is much closer than any of the others for us to have heard it. Tegan, let me see that weapon."

Tegan turned and stared at him but wordlessly handed over the pistol and drew the other one in the same moment. "Which way do you want to cover?"

"Neither", he answered, pointing the gun at the ceiling as he examined it. He sighed with disappointment a moment later. "No stun setting. I assumed as much. Tegan, if you have to fire at one of these people, it will likely be fatal. I can't ask you---."

"You didn't ask me," she cut him off but quietly, ironically in an almost parental tone. "And I figured that out myself a while ago. There's a trigger on here, a sight, and a charge level but no other controls. And if we only stunned them it would leave that many more behind us when we get out or alive to be eaten."

The Doctor went slightly cold and looked at Tegan with strange grief and a sudden new respect. She was no longer the naïve woman who had stumbled into the TARDIS. Having been exposed to so much danger, her thinking was more tactical now, her ability to see through people and situations as sharp, and right now sharper, than his own. She wanted to be with him, to do what she was doing, to have the Universe at her disposal danger or not… none of which made her willingness to kill any easier for him. That change was due to him also, and it was one that he regretted. He looked into her large, calm eyes and felt exhausted the eternally dark day, the tension, and the toxin catching up with him. He looked about the dim corridor for another set of quarters. "I think it's time we rest for the ---."

Another rumbling screech cut him off, and this time they could hear footsteps, running and scampering in short bursts, biped footsteps. The Doctor could tell the direction of them and a surge of adrenalin brought him back up to speed. He handed Tegan back to the spare gun and she holstered it as he grabbed their shoulders and urged them forward, away from the sound of the growling and scuffling. The nearest crew quarters, going by his estimate of their frequency so far, were at least ten minutes further along the path. Reasoning that the Doctor had figured out the source of the noise, Tegan darted a few feet ahead and to the left and fired several volleys into the rock ceiling. Splinters and ricochettes filled the air for a few seconds and something howled angrily, loud and close, just out of range of the light. She thought she might have seen a shape moving in the darkness but didn't want to rely on it. She rejoined the others as they headed forward.

The doors were in sight when they finally encountered their pursuers, hearing their uneven footsteps and turning to see that there were two of them, wearing the shreds of insulated gray uniforms, their pointed teeth showing behind mouths that dripped saliva and hung slightly open. Their eyes, having adapted to the darkness, looked huge and wild. Both were muscular but far too lean and one of them had facial hair growing at bizarre angles and lengths, as if at times it was randomly tugged out. The sight of them froze the travelers for a moment and Tegan raised the barrel of the pistol and aimed it at the ceiling, firing so that a shower of stones came down between the now-deranged time project workers and themselves. The pair hesitated for a moment and then surged forward, picking up the splintered hot stones produced and heaving them directly at the Doctor and his companions.

Tegan fired again, closer, and gave the two wretched figures a moment's pause, enough that they were able to reach the waiting door into the crew quarters. As Nyssa opened it, the two moved again, realizing their quarry was about to escape. The Doctor shoved Tegan inside just seconds before she could fire again, reaching safety himself only just moments before a filthy, long-nailed hand banged against the small window in the closing door. Nyssa could see it as she was locking the door, scraping against the clear panel just over the Doctor's shoulder as he held it closed. Wheezing slightly he took two steps to turn around and fall into one of the chairs in the kitchen area.

Tegan glanced at the door and looked away before she could see anything else, a tortured, once-rational face pressed against it, or a crazed clutching hand. "How long before they lose interest?"

"No way of knowing," the Doctor answered, not looking either now that the door was sealed. "It depends on how long before their hunger drives them elsewhere or how long they can recall that anything of interest is in here. I suggest we find something to block the window."

Nyssa did. A black towel in the bath section that she hung over two jagged edges she created with the help of a tool in the small kit in the pack she had brought. Tegan busied herself in the kitchen area again, still running on adrenalin, her two weapons remaining in easy reach. There was something acceptably like tea in the larder of the crew quarters and she made all of them a cup of it first before looking for anything more substantial. Nyssa took hers and the Doctor's and headed over to the couch where the Doctor now sat, spent and frustrated. She knew the change in Tegan had disturbed him, had seen it in his eyes when Tegan had made her assessment of the weapons and the consequences of merely stunning the scientists and workers affected by the temporal distortion Miros's work had created. It perhaps disturbed him more than his own situation. "Doctor."

He opened his eyes and took the warm drink as she sat down, facing him, one leg folded beneath her. "Thank you, Nyssa." He looked like he wanted to say something more but didn't know what and simply sat forward to drink the strong beverage. There was a stimulant in it, strong enough that he would get through the meal Tegan was preparing before he would need to rest. He knew that Nyssa was watching him without seeming to do so, another tactic that she had doubtless learned at court on Traken when it was better to seem to know nothing of some situations until the right time, the way of politics anywhere. She was very good at it; perhaps he was just imagining her watchfulness. That was a ridiculous thought, another part of his mind immediately countered; being in the company of Nyssa and Tegan both was almost like being in the company of two different sides of the same tigress. He glanced between them both and wondered for a few moments what Leela was doing now and how fast she and these two would become her friends.

No noises came from outside the sealed door after an hour or so had passed or if they had the door was too dense to let them be heard. They spent the intervening hour between arriving and the silence listening to the scrabbling and banging and glad that there was nothing that could be used as a ram, if these once clever minds could still even use tools. The noises had continued through the meal Tegan had fixed, something that was remarkably like cauliflower and a few slices of a rich red meat that seemed akin to deer steaks.

The Doctor waved off another cup of the Ecosian tea and went to prepare for bed. Tegan turned off the kitchen light as he shut the door to the bath and with darkness behind her lifted the black towel and glanced through the small window in the door. The two sad creatures were huddled against the wall together, perhaps waiting them out since they had run out of options for banging, scraping, and pounding. She hoped they'd be gone before it was time to leave because they'd be much harder to get rid of if they had to leave past them in the "morning" or whatever one wanted to call it in this eternal darkness.

Tegan tried not to think on the maddened souls any longer as she crept into bed a bit later. While Nyssa was preparing for bed and the Doctor beginning to fall into another healing trance, she had leaned one of the kitchen chairs against the door and stacked several of the dishes into it. If the door opened at all before they wanted it to there would be a warning clatter. There had been, of course, no way to set up the perimeter scanners they had used the night before so the solution had been Tegan through and through, low-tech but highly effective. Feeling secure enough to sleep, she turned to take one last look at the Doctor and sat up again with a tired sigh. He was shivering in his sleep, even beneath the bright blue covers of the wide lower bunk. She went to the thermostat and turned it what she thought was up, nothing happened. She turned it the other way instead and was rewarded with a blast of cool air from the vent above the heating panel. She shoved it up harder with no result. Just great.

Tegan stopped and thought and pounced on the pack in the spare kitchen chair, digging out one of the thermal blankets and hunting for the control unit. She finally thought she had struck out again there, too, that it had been broken off (though she could detect no damage) or that Nyssa had taken what she had only thought were thermal blankets but then she noticed how warm she was where the gray blanket rested on her legs and in her hands. Smiling, she stood up and unfolded it the rest of the way and went to the bunk across from her own and tossed it over the Doctor, making sure it covered him completely before she lay down herself again.

Her rest lasted an hour and she woke with a single cross thought: 'Damned second cup of tea". Returning from the bath she sat down on the bed again, taking the obligatory look at the Doctor as she did. He was still in the healing trance, he hadn't moved at all, but if anything, the shivering was worse. She moved to sit down beside him and touched his cheek. Ice-cold. Her hand moved beneath the blanket to touch his. It was slightly, only slightly warmer, the same temperature as the interior of the blanket, which was cool to the touch on the outside. Tegan rolled her eyes at her own stupidity. The blanket wasn't battery-powered but made of some material that reflected body heat, which the Doctor had far too little of to do him much good now that the toxin was changing itself. She wondered for a moment if Miros had even foreseen that it would do so and given how badly he wanted the Doctor to get to his trapped family it seemed like a stupid side-effect to program in. None of which solved the immediate problem. At this rate the Doctor would be exhausted from resting if she didn't find some way to get him warmer. She looked up at Nyssa; the girl was dead asleep. She dreaded waking her and there was one obvious solution that didn't require it, even if the Doctor would be rattled by it when he woke. Perhaps she would wake up before him and save him the stress.

Not sure she wasn't rattled herself, Tegan lifted up to the thermal blanket and the first woven cover, and left the blue sheet in place as she slid into the wide bunk next to the Doctor, her eyes on his face as she slid her legs down next to his and lay on her side facing him. The sheet between them, she let the two blankets fall into place and was rewarded within several minutes with a build-up of warmth. At nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, she was a veritable furnace compared to a Gallifreyan. Laying stiffly away from the Doctor but with them both still underneath the blankets completely, Tegan counted the minutes until she felt his shivering stop and could hear his breath moving past his parted lips without shuddering. She lowered her head onto her coiled up arm and wondered what waking would bring for both of them.


	7. Chapter 7

It was Nyssa who woke first, pushing off the covers and twisting her loosened clothing back into place. She wished they'd had a way to have proper sleeping clothes but in these situations it was sometimes best if one was dressed to move quickly. She moved to step down carefully from the top bunk, intending to begin breakfast for all of them them and to prepare a dosage of the medication for the Doctor. It was as she turned that she noticed that the Doctor was not alone, that Tegan lay beside him but not touching him, a fine sheen of sweat covering her as she slept. She also realized the Doctor was actually sleeping, not in the healing trance, which meant he had done what repairs could be done for now and was merely lightly resting, soon to wake. He had no idea that Tegan had been or was in the bed with him, obviously out of what had to be some unforeseen concern. Nyssa was unaware of any other relationship between the Doctor and Tegan that would have lead to this otherwise and considering their living circumstances there was little she would have missed.

Reason overcame her surprise and confusion after a few minutes and it was then that she recognized the thermal blanket and realized what the only logical prompting of the situation had to have been. Feeling slightly foolish at her own wonderings, she lowered herself silently to the floor, leaned over Tegan, and put her fingertips over Tegan's mouth as she shook her gently, not saying a word.

Tegan's eyes opened in seconds and she met Nyssa's gaze with a blush deepened by the fact she was already flush with warmth. Moving slowly and silently, she moved out from the covers and stood up, saying nothing until they were out in the living area. "It wasn't anything like you're thinking," she fumbled out, still speaking softly.

Nyssa laughed quietly, "Yes, it was, Tegan. Because all I thought was that the Doctor must've been freezing and you solved the problem with the only recourse available to us. Even if he'd known I'm sure he would've gotten over the shock of it in favor of the need." The lie was a small one and telling Tegan she had indeed wondered at first would serve no purpose but to worsen the situation. She touched her friend's arm for a moment and the Australian woman's blush began to fade. "I'm glad you were here. If he knew, I think it would have been far more uncomfortable for him if it had been me and Trakenites have somewhat lower body temperatures than Humans."

"Do you think he knows?"

"Perhaps. It depends on how far down into himself the healing trance took him. Best to not bring it up."

"It doesn't bother me, Nyss, but his lot are so uptight about that sort of thing, I don't know what to think. Do you have anything that would help him?"

Nyssa shook her head doubtfully. "I don't think so. The Doctor is able to tolerate much greater cold than we are from the outside, but this is from the inside and it's very cool here on this moon. The toxin is wreaking havoc with him in ways that I don't think this Miros even believed it would."

Tegan looked up at that, "I thought the same thing. He would've wanted the Doctor to be able to function better than this, even if he knew you'd be helping him."

Nyssa's head rose abruptly, her chestnut curls bouncing as a sigh erupted from her, "Or perhaps I'm not as good as Miros thought."

"I doubt that very much," Tegan responded. "Come on, we need to see if our friends are still out there and to get moving. We still have a long way to go."

Nyssa prepared the injection as Tegan prepared some quick food and more of the Ecosian tea. Nyssa went down to one knee and gently tilted the Doctor's head to one side; she felt for the jugular and then injected the drug so slowly he didn't wake. She was gathering her things when he did a half-hour later, and saw her tossing away the empty ampoule of the drug. It caught the Doctor's eye and his fingertips brushed at his throat. It was when his hand came clear of the blanket that he became aware of the coolness of the room. "Curious."

Nyssa turned with a smile, "Good mor… well, whatever it is. What's curious?"

"I never should have been able to generate that much heat. There must be something very unusual about these blankets. Did you use yours?" The Doctor sat up, reaching for his sweater, and putting on his coat a moment later as he stood.

"No, Doctor, I was quite fine without it. Come on, Tegan's got food for us. Is it morning or …?" She asked, more to change the subject than anything.

"Of course, poisoned or not, I am still a Time Lord. I can keep track of that even inside of this moon, but as we go deeper and the circumference of the moon lessens for us, the time of diurnal duration becomes shorter than on the surface. Even a good time piece could never account for that. You injected me while I was asleep, good thinking, makes for a much better waking. Come on; let's see if we still have to get by our visitors from last night."

Tegan was looking out the door window when they went into the next room, pulling the towel down carefully a moment later. "They're gone, unless they're hiding under the door and I gave it a pretty sound banging to flush them out. How are you, Doc'?"

"As well as I can be for now. You've prepared a fine meal, I see. Let's enjoy it and get moving."

They did, and even found a thermos-type vessel in which to carry a few pints of the Ecosian tea. The two Ecosians were gone, drawn off by whatever primitive force had taken over their minds. The Doctor suspected little was left beyond eating and that was facilitated by whatever means were necessary. He doubted there was anything to be done to restore them given the time they'd been surviving as little more than beasts. If they were forced to kill any of them it would be more mercy than murder. None of them would have could have envisioned such a death as the one they were suffering, scientists and technicians turned demented and bestial. He realized Tegan would have had the same thoughts and would not hesitate to kill if they were threatened but he had no desire to have her make that decision once again. On the freighter surrounded by Cybermen, he was unaware she had left the TARDIS and brought herself into the situation without him. Here they were together and he owed his companions more allegiance that the sad, deranged souls around them. Distasteful as it was, he took the extra gun from her some hours later. The distant sounds of the mad were no longer so distant and in the increasingly tight and twisting stone corridors they were coming from more and more directions.

Nyssa had never felt her intellectual abilities more called to the fore, not because of the toxin that she was helping the Doctor to battle but because of the need to keep back the dread the darkness brought on, as if it were a living thing as threatening as the creatures that had once been persons of learning. They could see a hundred or so yards around them as the strips of lights in the ceiling and the junctures of the floor and walls guided them down into the moon. They remained lit behind them to the extent of their vision.

Nyssa didn't know if they were lit all the way back to the entrance but doubted it, yet another way to keep them from retreating. She had mapped their progress so far with the ground navigation instrument she had in the pack over her shoulder. They still had a few days travel left to get where they were going. She hoped that once they reached there, if the Doctor was able to undo what had been done, that he would be able to use the new recall circuit and bring the TARDIS to them. She couldn't imagine Miros would chose to have his family return through the path they were being forced to take because of his lack of faith in the Doctor and his worry that the TARDIS would further damage the unstable departure matrix. The sound of nearby breathing caught her attention. She looked first at the Doctor but found him looking well enough if already somewhat fatigued to her right and Tegan looked as brusque as ever. "Doctor?"

"I hear it," he answered as he turned, looking behind them and around them as they moved again toward the wall. Tegan's weapon was out but pointed at the ground. A rustle brought their eyes upward and a dirty face peered back at the through the vent of the life-support system. This one belonged to a female. Her hair fell in dirty shreds around her face but her uniform still had its collar. She was lying down on the vent, looking at them with hunger in her eyes but too timid to attack alone. Her face was a bit fuller than the other two had previously been but her teeth were filthy and one was chipped.

The Doctor remained where he was, trying to meet her eyes. "Hello, can you understand me?"

It was the first voice she had obviously heard in months that carried a semblance of sanity. She looked calmer for a moment, and then, as if reminded of the rationality taken from her, she shrieked and scrambled over the vent fast enough for them to see that her uniform was fitly but nearly intact but her shoes were gone. The Doctor sighed in frustration and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. "Ridiculous. If these are people who cared so much for their families, I can't believe nothing was done to retrieve these people and get them some help. For all the ambition Miros must've had to develop this project he certainly seemed to still give his family some priority."

"We can't demand he help them until we get you out of this mess," Tegan said as she put her weapon back in its holster.

"Agreed," Nyssa said in turn, but her eyes returned to the vent. "Perhaps they were unfamiliar with the instability the temporal flux created. The Doctor and I might be able to help them to develop a drug to incapacitate them long enough to bring them out of this awful place."

Tegan pointed at the remains of a meal some twenty yards away from them. "If they do that, they better be able to get to all of them at once; I don't think they're just eating Ecosian chicken."

They resumed walking, the lights activating steadily in front of them. Nyssa looked up an hour or so later when the Doctor's hand fell on her shoulder. He was not looking at her, merely seeking guidance as his eyes fell to the ground as they moved. Tegan remained ahead of them, slowing her pace subtly and looking for the next set of crew quarter doors as well as the threat posed from around and now perhaps above them. She hoped the grating over the vents was as intact as it seemed. It had only been a few months since the research base was to have become operational so she had little worry that they would have crazed ex-scientists dropping down like snakes from the trees through worn out grate. Still, she was tired and wired enough herself to appreciate the security of a locked door and a hot meal. She didn't speculate on what the sleeping arrangements would be tonight but she would do what was needed and they would come to terms later. "Nyssa, how far have we gone?"

Nyssa kept walking but retrieved the ground navigation unit from the bag she carried. "Just about about 24 kilometers. We've made good progress but remember that 70 kilometer distance we were given was on a direct vector, not the distance we would have to cover through the corridors. Doctor, I think it's time we stopped. You'll need your rest for the remainder of the journey."

The Doctor was smiling but to himself as he lifted his head to meet Nyssa's firm gaze. He'd been to more planets than he could count, encountered more beings than he could recall, and on all of them – _that --_ tone of voice in humanoid females seemed the same. Not that he would've argued regardless, not without a very good reason, or in the case of Nyssa, not without facts she did not possess. Her eyes were compassionate, her tone once again regal and commanding while so terribly polite. He wondered, however, if she would have used it on any other of his regenerations. The third one, yes, he realized; Jo Grant had often done so. The first one, not likely. The second one, yes, but he would've been to busy babbling to hear her, and his fourth not likely would she have at all or if she did, she would simply have been ignored until he dropped. He'd gathered a bit of wisdom from that sort of behavior; one occasionally had to make concessions to the mortal coil. He didn't answer her insistent recommendation, merely nodded, and let her lead him forward.

The door was the same, recessed into the wall and with a small window in it. This set of rooms was another like the first that was ready for occupants but unoccupied. The food units were stocked but the décor was a dull gray that was nevertheless a great deal brighter than the corridor outside. They fell into their usual routine, Tegan preparing a filling meal from ingredients she was becoming more accustomed to, and Nyssa preparing the rooms then seeing to the Doctor as he rested on the dark green couch. She injected him with the drug twice but then Tegan heard the soft hiss twice again and turned to see Nyssa inject his calves this time, then work her strong, thin fingers into the stiffened muscles. Already half-way into a healing trance, he seemed unaware of her actions as she knelt before him and stood a few minutes later.

Tegan looked up from the plates as she filled them from the skillet, having thawed and cooked several pieces of the turkey-sized bird that seemed a staple of the Ecosian diet. "Well?" Her voice barely carried to her friend's ears.

"He'll make it there. I'll turn up the thermostat."

"All right, but turn it back after he's asleep."

Nyssa's eyes widened slightly. "Why?"

"Because I'll stay with him tonight after he's out. It's more effective and you'll never get to sleep if we have to have it as hot as I managed to have it get under that thermal blanket."

"How did you stand it?"

"I spent my summers in the Outback, a desert in my country. It's much cooler at night, so when it gets really bad, you do then and sleep during the day. You get used to it and if the clothes on Traken are all as heavy as yours you must be used to it being colder."

That was true, Nyssa thought, and the clothes weren't the only things that were more restrictive. If she had been able to assist the Doctor as Tegan was doing she doubted she could take the needed proximity in such stride. "All right, I'll waken him and we'll follow your plan."

An hour and a half later, Tegan was again watching the Doctor carefully as she eased down beside him and Nyssa guided the cover over them both, having just turned the thermostat back down. She returned a moment later with a small rectangular object that had a padded side which she pressed against the doctor's forehead until something on the front told her it had locked in place. "It's a delta wave inducer," she explained. "It should keep him asleep until we're ready for him to wake again."

Tegan nodded and began to lower herself to the bed where she had been propped up on her elbow watching Nyssa. She sat up slowly again and stripped the sweater off that she had worn the night before, reassured by the delta wave inducer that her own presence would remain undetected. Beneath it she wore a thin tank top that was keeping the slightly itchy sweater away from her more sensitive skin. She tossed the sweater over on the bunk above the one were Nyssa now lay and lowered herself again, carefully keeping a space between herself and the Doctor but finally reaching forward and taking his hand. It was frigid but warming slowly in her grip through the sheet and the color was returning to his face as she lay beside him, not sharing the pillow but with her head on her folded arm, shaking slightly in disbelief that the being beside her was some 900 years old. If she hadn't seen him regenerate, she never would have believed him no matter what else in the Universe she saw. In the semi-dark (none of them could bring themselves to turn off the lights) he looked young and still terribly exhausted. This was almost worse than his regeneration had been, but at least this was easier than carrying him. Tegan fell asleep to dreams of running on stairs that went up and down at the same time.

The warmth was amazing, welcome, penetrating, impossible... The Doctor was aware of little more than the heat and his own body as he repaired what he could of the damage done by the poison, the toxins produced by his own body in the form of the acid in his exhausted muscles, kept there by the restricted blood flow and the limited oxygen. Carrying the portable respirator would have been impractical and there was enough oxygen content on Ecosia Beta to get him through. The healing trance would let him get rid of the toxins and bring about the relief there. Nyssa must have found a way to raise his body temperature and injected it near his right hand. He retreated further, guiding and directing and providing the telekinetic energy to heal and consciously repair the damage. His heart slowed and his delta wave production suddenly quadrupled, drawing him down further, slowing his metabolism even more than it already was. His heart slowed again, the cold, oxygen-heavy air came to his lungs and found little blood had arrived to relieve it of its burden. He slid further down into the darkness, aware of little else but the healing that needed to be done. The delta waves grew stronger, taking him further, bringing peace, so much peace… too much.

The safety mechanism kicked in, without it he would go into the self-induced coma Time Lords were capable of but he would need time for that; the technique was inappropriate to the situation in any case. Nyssa didn't know; she had probably placed the delta wave inducer on him to help him rest. The combination of it and the healing trance was too suppressive. He fought his way back against its effects and semi-conscious tried to reach up and remove it. His right hand was hopelessly tangled in the covers and he used his left, feeling the brisk air touch him as he did.

The Doctor opened his eyes a moment later and looked at the bottom of the top bunk, preparing himself again to return to the healing trance with the delta wave inducer removed. His eyes moved to the ceiling and slowly down to the top bunk across from him; it was then that he noticed, of course, it was empty and dully wondered where Tegan was, if she was awake and troubled by the chance she would have to kill any of the Ecosians. He would have to talk to her. She needed her rest in any case. The Doctor took a strained breath and turned to rise that he might seek her out.

He found her, of course, long before he'd thought, just as he rose to his right, still dazed from the added help of the delta wave inducer. Her hand holding his through the sheet, Tegan lay next to him, her face all but covered by the two blankets. Her body heat had created a veritable furnace beneath the thermal blanket but she was sleeping comfortably, her short dark hair mussed and slightly darker with sweat.

And he knew in an instant Tegan had been next to him last night as well.

The Doctor lay still in the darkness, sorting through feelings he had suppressed for more decades than he wanted to admit, not simply of latent desire or passion but confusion over this intimacy, the thing that Rassilon said was one of the great disruptors of intellectual achievement. A Time Lord must never become involved, must never deeply care about more than the mental exercise of solving the equation or situation in the most logical way possible, nor should he or she be distracted by the emotions of others.

Or were they overreacting, both Rassilon and himself?

Tegan had not come to his bed but to his aid, had not come for pleasure or intimacy but to provide for him what science could not. It was science, at the moment, which had failed him… and Tegan had come to come to be here with respect to his feelings and discretion; without Nyssa's small oversight, he may never have known. Was he now being illogical to reject her care because of the ancient notions of a man widely rumored to have been a misogynist and a narcissist? What opinion of others could the man hold if he thought himself fit to set forth the rules that guided the interactions of those whose achievements made them also Lords of Time? And what sort of man gave guidelines that told them to sit idle as billions perished again and again.

And aside of the Gallifreyan equation -- this was Tegan, who -- thrown in to the bizarre world of their first encounter, having little to trust at his regeneration -- had still defied the authorities and saved his life, the same Tegan who had survived the Mara and allowed him to become part of her mind to help fight the ancient evil, the Tegan who had had enough compassion for him that she had walked into a ship full of Cybermen in order to warn him of their presence. How could he now be so disturbed by the close presence of her sleeping body, inert and exhausted beside him yet the source of the warmth that would enable him to heal? Had their positions been reversed, would he have not done the same? Tegan wanted nothing from him but to rest well, anything else he was dealing with came from his own inhibitions. For long moments he lay half-risen and chilled, the possessor of a mind that was supposed to be guided by logic, but had been so insulated from emotions as most understood them that a mere act of the caring he often preached had befuddled his senses and proprieties. Indeed, finding her at his side was nothing less than one of the small, beautiful moments he had spoken of so passionately to the Cyberleader. The conclusion was simple: the logic of his stalled emotions was flawed.

The Doctor lowered himself to the bed and closed his eyes. Tegan's scent filled him when he did, fueled by the generous warmth, and instead of it making him ill-at-ease to have her so near, logic now bade him to let it bring him more rest, let it bring him humility – to accept that for all that science could do – only the human body and human heart would see him through this ordeal. He could've have had no better companions for this journey through darkness and the sudden brightness their struggle had just brought his soul. Tegan's warm breath traveled over his shoulder and mingled with his own as he turned toward her and fell into a secure and dreamless sleep, his hand now returning her grasp, at peace not merely with her presence but the ancient demons that would have kept him from appreciating it.


	8. Chapter 8

The corridors had become even more serpentine, just as the Doctor had predicted, their length before the next turn becoming short enough that their entire lengths were lit by the lights that were guiding them. This gave them a relief from the feeling that the darkness around them was omnipresent but it also gave them a shorter space in which to detect and react to the maddened beings slowly dying in the labyrinth, dying but still not weak. The weak were culled out; they had seen enough evidence of that. Tegan had taken to carrying her own weapon in her hand and not the holster but with the power off. It was easy enough to activate quickly and after a bit of practice, Tegan found her Outback-learned shooting skills had returned quickly enough. She only wished she were still contemplating the deaths of milk bottles and cans. She reminded herself that death would be a mercy for the demented souls that had been stranded here with their minds corrupted, reduced to something that was less than animal. Even an animal could understand when it was being helped.

The Doctor bade them stop two hours or so into their journey, his face a mask of quiet concentration as he settled down on the floor, legs crossed, his fingers raised to his temples. Several moments passed as Nyssa knelt before him and used her own skills to somehow support what he was doing. Tegan later learned she had been screening out the mental residue of the disturbed minds around them so that the Doctor could more easily concentrate. Tegan had merely stood behind him with her back to the wall, eyes sweeping the corridor that was lit from end to end, the small lights reflecting off the dully polished gray walls. The Doctor stood up after several minutes and helped Nyssa to her feet. She took his hand politely but put very little of her weight against him as she rose. "What were you doing, Doctor?"

"We're getting close enough that I can feel the temporal disturbance. It's expanding. The good news to that is it will be less concentrated when I enter it but like anything else that will be a matter of timing."

"What do you mean, enter it?" Tegan demanded, taking her eyes off the corridor to look at him.

The Doctor looked around for a few seconds, wondering how to explain in a way that wouldn't incur the Galactic Wrath of Tegan, not that it would be directed against him but the Universe in general. "The field of unstable energy being generated by the failed departure matrix, because I'm a Time Lord I can enter into it."

"I thought you told me Time Lords themselves didn't travel in time, that was why they needed TARDISes."The Doctor sighed to himself and almost smiled. She was learning to pay attention. He would have to be more careful of that in the future. "Yes, I did, you're right; but I was speaking of vast interstellar distances. We can enter into an unstable time matrix in many cases and use our own telepathic energy to rebalance the field,"

"Even poisoned?" Tegan pressed.

"I said I could do it, not that it would be easy, but we have very little choice as I would definitely be killed if I don't." He finished off quietly, giving Tegan a look that begged her not to continue.

She didn't, more responsive to his silent beg for quiet than if he had shouted her down. "We won't let that happen. Come on then; we're not getting any closer standing here." She traded a covered glance with Nyssa as they moved to either side of the Time Lord and continued into the heart of the moon. A distant shriek echoed behind them and not for the first time, they wondered about their journey home.

Another hour passed in silence; they spoke little as they moved in order to be able to hear the fierce yet sorrowful calls of the maddened souls around them. The Doctor stopped them just a bit past an hour later, his hand rising then falling to Nyssa's shoulder. "There are three of them around the corner, waiting. And we know there are already a few behind us in the corridors now. Any sign of weakness and we'll have more of them to deal with."

Tegan flipped the safety off of the gun and the power bar glowed green it's entire length, diminished very little by the practice she had taken. "We have to keep moving forward then. I'll see if I can scare them off."

The Doctor nodded, unhappy and hoping they could avoid confrontation but if these sad creatures still had enough intellect to work together for their prey they were more dangerous. He guided the two women toward the far wall, lit dimly and curving up toward the domed ceiling, the wall opposite the sharp turn of the tunnel ahead, allowing them to see farther down the shaft angling off to their right. It was the only way they could proceed and the lights going down it would activate the moment they got close enough to trigger them, enough perhaps to run off those who lay in wait or set them to attack.

Tegan stopped just as they would have reached the edge of activating the lights and braced herself to shoot, listening to the scrabble of bare feet and ragged clothing and the Doctor's slightly ragged breathing. His back was to the wall beside her and his own weapon was out but pointed downward. Tegan stared at him sideways for a moment, her thoughts muddling. He looked utterly unnatural with the weapon in his hands, as if someone had just handed him a dead goat. She wondered not for the first time how he'd lived 900 hundred years in the Universe after having pissed a good number of its inhabitants off, and only been marginally happy with defending himself. Then again, this Doctor seemed a lot more ill-at-ease with personal violence than the first one she'd met. Before she could ruminate father, the lights came on down the corridor ahead of them.

The three maddened Ecosians cringed at the sudden light but didn't retreat. There were two males and one female, filthy as one could imagine and unable to do much more than grunt now. What they could see of their bodies was coiled, trim muscle but their malnutrition was obvious. The remains of the meals they were passing, the food being sent down to those who had survived, was plentiful, but as they devolved their bodies were likely demanding more and more resources to survive.

The Doctor put the weapon point down in front of him and took a step forward, "Can you understand me? We'd like to help you but we must reach the main chamber."

He stopped when they lurched forward, their focus now on the fact that the gun was down. Nyssa fired into the ceiling and hit two of the small lights. The explosion drove the Ecosians back but after a moment, the three of them, encouraging each other turned and charged.

Tegan's shot connected first, unsurprisingly, and the first of the males dropped, twitching and convulsing. With surprising alacrity, the Doctor's next two shots felled the remaining pair. He sighed deeply and went to his knees between the three bodies, all of which were still spasming, examining them quickly and with some relief. Nyssa did the same with the bio-scanner from the satchel over her shoulder as Tegan watched for any sign of the others who had been behind them. After several minutes, Nyssa stood and helped the Doctor to his feet, her gaze going to her Human friend.

"It seems Ecosians are more resistant to these weapons than we believed. It's left these three nearly comatose."

"Either they're more resistant," the Doctor added, "or their metabolism's been so altered that they've become so over the time they've been here. In either case, we have to see that the one's we've stunned don't fall prey to the others."

Easier said, as always. It took them half an hour to find three different sets of crew quarters and then to drag each of them into one and place them on the sofa. The work fatigued the Doctor far more quickly than it might have otherwise but they wanted to make certain the ones they had rendered helpless would not be harmed not only by the rest who were hidden but by each other. There would be enough food in the crew quarters for them for a few days and Nyssa had carefully left open the cupboards and opened a few small containers so that it would be easy to find even in their diminished state. At the Doctor's instruction they had also disconnected the heating units and dropped the knives and other sharp implements down the waste chutes to keep the Ecosians from using them to harm themselves.

Tegan smiled in relief as they sealed the last door, the room holding the female. "Well, it's good to know we won't have to kill them and there should be enough rooms to tuck them all in one if we get the chance."

"Yes, indeed," the Doctor answered, still catching his breath as they moved once again deeper into the moon and the chill. "It seems so but in a weakened enough state the charge would still be enough to kill." It still had not left him that they had not known that the Ecosians would survive when Tegan had first fired.

If it had occurred to her, Tegan's sense of relief had cancelled it out completely and she fired quickly a few hours later when they were attacked once again just as they began to seek out quarters of their own. The only one of them who had retained any sense of time was, of course, the Doctor, and even that was an almost pointless accomplishment under the circumstances of the endless twilight. Two more Ecosians, emboldened by their desperation, had attempted to attack them and been dispatched to a set of rooms; the competition for food was more intense as they neared the main chamber since they survived here in greater numbers.

An unmolested hour past that, they were once again locking themselves in for the night; beyond the doors the sounds of temporal dementia loomed louder. Nyssa tried to force herself to consider the sad sounds for what they were, a sign of their progress toward the chamber barely housing the unstable time field. They were losing a good bit of time tonight compared to the other days due to the Doctor's physical exhaustion and the drain of simple nervous energy on them all. Seated at the kitchen table, her evening meal passing her lips untasted, Nyssa studied the ground navigational plotter to check their progress against the quantity of the medication she had for the Doctor and then with the small resources she had tried to strengthen the formula. She even examined the compounds in the Ecosian food and spices in the kitchen to see what they might have to offer. Tegan found her asleep on the table, the bioscanner beeping softly in protest at a button pressed beneath her hand..

"Oh, Tegan, you should have woken me. I can't recall if I gave the Doctor the right dosage. I was going to check to see if a stronger one might be called for tonight. I've divided the dosages up between the pressure injectors. That way if we're separated we'll have a way to administer it. I'll show you." Nyssa rubbed at her eyes and slowly stood, not protesting as Tegan helped her off with the dark sweater.

"You were exhausted. I ran the Doctor off to sleep after you shot him up and before he noticed how wiped out you were and then took a shower and ran my clothes through the fresher. Go on, the hot water works here. You can relax." She handed Nyssa back her sweater and patted her on the shoulder as she headed into the bath.

Nyssa stopped after they passed the seemingly sleeping Time Lord, turning just as she reached the doorway, "I'm glad you're back, Tegan. This would've been impossible without you."

"That's a switch," Tegan grinned, whispering a laugh. "He'd tell you most things are impossible with me."

Nyssa smiled herself at that, "Not this time. You're what's keeping us all together; you're still the coordinator. This darkness, it's making it's way inside of me like the Mara entered you but I look at you and realize I can survive this and I think the Doctor feels the same."

The ex-air hostess merely shrugged, her face coloring as she picked up her own sweater and folded it onto the bunk above the Doctor who lay unmoving beneath the green covers and the gray thermal blanket. He had removed his coat and sweater and loosened his collar. Tegan had removed his shoes after he'd fallen into the deathly still healing trance. Nyssa looked at him once then went into the bath and closed the door.

Alone, Tegan stared after the younger woman for a moment, complimented and honored by Nyssa's words she might have been but she couldn't yet find much satisfaction. If she'd been quicker knocking that tracer off the Doctor's hand they might not have been in this mess at all. "I must be crazy', she finally thought, "I came back for more, for more watching my friends in danger, more monsters, more running around in the dark', and the truth of it was she had never felt really alive before meeting the Doctor. She thought being an air hostess would fill her want for adventure, one cultivated by summers on the Outback and rock climbing. She smiled for a moment and remembered how stupid she had felt scaling the cliffs leading up to Castrovalva, only because of heels and uniform. Other than that, she'd been right at home hanging off a clump of rock in the middle of nowhere. She'd only been so abrasive to the Doctor early on because she was scared not just of the creeps and the trouble they seemed to find, but of how much she was enjoying it on the inside. She'd never been happier in her life than when the Universe had seen fit to have her join the TARDIS crew again. Only this time she wasn't complaining, this time she was out here to have an opportunity few humans ever would, to make a difference in the rest of the cosmos they didn't know existed. She only wished she had a dozen lives to spend doing it. Tegan's dark gaze dropped to the still form on the bed, remembering that the Doctor now might not as well.

Sighing, Tegan pulled her tank top free of her trousers and slowly eased into the bed next to the Doctor, snatching down one of the pillows from the more narrow top bunk. The Doctor had begun to shiver as the healing trance deepened and she moved a bit more quickly, knowing he would be even colder for a moment as she lifted the blankets. Moments later she was again beside him, wondering what her Mother would say much less the Time Lord who had never been anything but a pure gentleman. Tegan didn't fall asleep until she heard Nyssa climb into the bed against the opposite wall.

The cramping in his leg woke the Time Lord painfully, so tight it had drawn his left foot almost parallel with the bed. He sat up slowly, mindful of the woman beside him and tried to pull the muscle back straight, gasping quietly as he did and wishing he could stand and use his weight to stretch out the cramp in more direct terms. It eased a bit as he pulled against the smooth white fabric of his socks and then caught him off-guard again as he let up, his shoulders also exhausted. He hissed again, more loudly this time, and then resumed unknotting the muscles. Eyes closed, he first felt the cold of the air and heard the hiss of the injector before he opened his eyes and found Tegan leaning over him; her hands were beneath the covers, pulling down his left sock, and the cold was now lapping at both of them. The cramp in his calf was already easing when she sat back and, as only Tegan could, looked him in the eye. "Better?"

"Yes, much," the Doctor answered, not sure where to go next. He thought he'd resolved all this, but then of course, Tegan had been asleep. She did what Tegan did, however, cut through the confusion and put her own stamp on things. He wondered if he would've gotten through this particular regeneration without her suspicion counterbalancing his more altruistic thoughts. If he survived this, he was suddenly sure he'd regenerate not long after Tegan left the TARDIS.

"I guess you're wondering what I'm doing here?" She said quietly, mindful of not waking Nyssa and adding to the situation.

The Doctor colored just a bit in the semi-darkness and drew some of the blankets back over his legs. "No, I discovered you with me last night. The delta wave inducer nearly put me into a coma and I pushed off its influence so strongly that I awoke and I discovered why I was warm enough to rest. The night before I thought it was the thermal cover then I thought Nyssa had given me something. Imagine my surprise…" He smiled thinly and shivered.

Tegan noticed but bided her time a bit. "It was the only way we had to keep you from shivering all night. Nyssa said that the drug is making all of your muscles so tight that it's hard for the ice-water you call blood to circulate properly, that was why you were so cold, that you were going to exhaust yourself trying to rest. She didn't have a drug that would help you, so I realized this was the only way. Sorry if it's knocked you off your game. It's a bit hard to believe it would make you this nervous."

"I'm not nervous", he shot back, very quietly and far too quickly. And to his surprise and confusion, Tegan laughed hard but silently.

"You look like a school girl in the back of a Chevy." She reached and took the blanket he was holding at his chest and he stared at her dully in the twilight. Her tactic changed from quiet teasing to reason. What she lacked in technical skill, Tegan made up for with her ability to read those about whom she cared. "Listen to me, you silly Time Lord. You were calmer on an operating table. Oh. Cripes, it's just me, just Tegan, and just another mess one of us needs getting out of, and we've faced worse than being near one another. You went into my mind, my consciousness, and pulled me out of the dark; all I want is to return the favor."

The Doctor took a moment to answer her, his eyes falling from her patient but insistent gaze, a deep sigh leaving him as his head arched back. "I do know that but knowing and accepting are sometimes different things. I thought I had worked this through but … you were asleep then and not able to talk some sense into me for a change." He managed a smile and then looked her in the eye. "Regardless of the facts, it's been a long time since I was near a woman in this manner under any circumstance. I'm sorry. Even if it's a medical necessity, it brings up certain… certain feelings I thought I had done away with long ago. It is unsettling but your help, your understanding, is far from unappreciated."

Tegan nodded and slowly placed her hand on the back of his neck. "I have wondered, you know, why you never seemed interested, or even made a remark that Nyssa or I were more than boys with squeaky voices." The Doctor turned from her with a fading half-smile still on his lips and leaned back against the warmth of her hand. He felt the warmth suddenly on his right arm also as she guided him back down to the bed. The hand on his neck slid to his shoulder, pushing him round as the hand on his arm pulled him down. He resisted for a moment, then released the tension with a short, sharp breath and followed her grip. She turned him slowly toward her as she lay down as well.

"Close your eyes. It's just me, just a few hours away from this nightmare. "

He did close them and started slightly, breath catching again, as his face met the smooth heat of her shoulder. She kept him from rising gently and after a moment he was surprised to find himself increasingly at ease. He could see her mind again; she wanted nothing.

Tegan barely breathed as she looked down at the top of the Time Lord's head and wondered how she'd suddenly known that what she was doing would be allowed. The Doctor had simply tensed for a moment then relaxed. She'd often wondered how a man who fought to save so many lives and risked his own to do it seemed uninterested in one of its most basic, if not the most basic, comforts, how he could give them lip service and run from them in practice. At first she thought it was because the constant danger would have scared off anyone who would have stayed with him, and then found that was far from true, and then she thought it was because none of the females she had seen him around were of his own species. She didn't know why she'd abandoned that theory but probably it was because he'd been so bloody open with everyone they'd met, even when she was warning him otherwise. She'd also figured that with a life-span as long as a Gallifreyan's that if some woman had stung him badly enough he should've had time to get over it and had ruled out that as a cause for his distance but apparently she might've been wrong. She drew the heavy blankets back up over them both and up to his chin. The Doctor could feel the vibration in her throat when she spoke.

"So, who was she?"

The Doctor breathed once, suddenly not as tired, but drawn to rest by the warmth that the small but strong body of his companion offered. "She was my wife," he began, surprising himself as the words fell from his mouth, almost as if someone else were speaking, as if they'd been waiting a few centuries to be released. Perhaps they had. "My wife for a very long time, as you might imagine. She bore me a son, and his wife bore my granddaughter, Susan whom I hope someday you might meet."

Tegan opened her mouth to answer and suddenly didn't know what, for once, to say. She heard what was unsaid also, that he'd not mentioned meeting the others, and regeneration or not, it still felt odd that he was old enough to have a granddaughter. She also realized that it was her only chance to learn what had driven this strange, wise man to right the Universe's wrongs. "They're gone, aren't they? Your wife, your son?"

He nodded, barely, his fine hair tickling her throat. "I was about to be arrested for my heretical views that we should help those races in catastrophic danger. I had interfered for the first time, stopped a planet from being destroyed by a comet half its size. Of course, that meant nothing, and for it I was going to be dragged off to a tribunal."

Tegan huffed and rolled her eyes even though he couldn't see her, "Bloody lot of good they're doing the Universe. It's all a game to them - who lives, who dies, and they don't want anyone else to play."

The Doctor smiled; she could feel the pull of his cheek against her breast. "I believe you've summed them up in your own inescapable way, Tegan."

She knew that already and hadn't met one of them but she also hadn't forgotten her other goal and aside from settling her own curiosity, making the Doctor focus on something other than the first time he'd been at rest in the arms of a woman for what might be centuries. Tegan suddenly felt very strange, oddly privileged, almost honored, even surreal. She tightened her embrace almost to prove to herself he was there. "So what happened to them?"

The Doctor's head jerked up slightly but Tegan felt him slowly become heavier. "I had returned home in the TARDIS I had borrowed, an old one I thought they wouldn't immediately miss. I was right, of course." Tegan smiled unseen. "They didn't notice. I left, alerted the planet in time to avert the comet, and came home, foolishly thinking that my success would have changed a few minds. I should've known it hadn't. Now I wasn't only a lunatic who had abused his education but a criminal. They came armed to arrest me, all of us."

"Your family, too?" Tegan asked quietly, unaware that her hand had drifted onto the back of his neck.

"Well, what was left of them. My son's wife had left him several months before because of his crazed father. But Susan adored him, adored me, and was old enough to choose to stay." He paused, caught up in the memory he had pushed away for so long, pushed away because he hadn't felt safe enough to remember it, to remember the first pain his interference had caused, the pain of believing that the billions of lives he had saved had been worth his interfering. Tegan's hand moving hypnotically on the back of his neck gently reminded him of the present.

"Oh, I was a prize. I had started a small revolution and needed to be an example. They had bothered to send the Castellan guard from the capitol, and it had been centuries since they'd used force of any kind, so long that the weapons they'd brought with them were almost completely unfamiliar, live energy weapons in the hands of people who carried false ones only for ceremony… One of them thought he knew the power settings."

Tegan finished for him, her hand stopping for a moment. "He didn't."

"No," the Doctor agreed quietly. "I was able to save Susan and myself only because they were so stunned themselves by what they'd done. My wife, my son, had pushed us into the TARDIS before them thinking they'd really only be interested in me. They were trying to protect me when they were killed."

Tegan stared up at the bottom of the top bunk, her throat tight. She took in a breath and steadied herself. "That's why you hate guns, any of them, and why I get on your nerves."

The Doctor laughed and found himself resting against her more easily, warmed by more than her metabolism. "I have wondered, Tegan, why you so quickly developed this habit of placing yourself in harm's way."

Tegan had wondered it herself in the wake of his wobbly regeneration, their crazy time on Castrovalva, and in the middle of facing a ship full of cranky Cybermen. She didn't know if he was ready for the answer but he had asked the question. "I do it because bitchy as I might have been, when everything was all over, I could see we made a difference. I never would've had a chance so I guess I just thought the best way I could help was make sure you could. I figured the creeps might find me a more fun target..."

Now that he had the answer, the Doctor wasn't all that surprised or unamused to hear it. Nor was he surprised to find he was falling again into an actual sleep, his mind strangely far from the toxin poisoning him, blackmailing fools having a go at temporal mechanics, and the mutants outside the sealed door. The last things he was aware of were the hand still stroking his neck and Tegan's deep, quiet voice in his ear. "Just another mess. Braveheart, Doctor, you'll survive."


	9. Chapter 9

Nyssa had enough sense to pretend to be asleep until the Doctor and Tegan awoke. She had been half-roused by their almost silent but long conversation and surprised when she had finally opened her eyes once their breathing told her they were asleep. She'd heard very little of it but they'd certainly seemed on good terms, a feeling that was confirmed when Nyssa turned to look at them and found herself impolitely staring.

Tegan lay on her back, dead to the world, and the Doctor lay on his side so close to her that his forehead rested against the crook of Tegan's long neck. Nyssa wondered if their positions had been achieved without their knowing it, a consequence of simple unconscious proximity or if Tegan (and it must have been Tegan) had brought the Time Lord to rest as he was, coiled next to her, head on her shoulder. Then she wondered briefly if he'd worsened and this was purely necessity but dismissed that in light of their long, quiet conversation. One of them had confronted more demons than the circumstances already had inflicted, and facing sudden mortality, she realized that it would have only been the Doctor. Despite his court-worthy manners in every other circumstance involving women, he now seemed deeply content in Tegan's embrace, as if the Universe had finally meted him out a measure of justice in the midst of yet another nightmare. For her part Tegan seemed more at peace as well, as if some need of her own had been filled.

Nyssa stared at them for a long moment before returning to sleep herself, wondering about what the future might now hold. It left her much to think about after she awoke and lay still, listening to them rise and ready themselves for another dark day. She rose only when Tegan clattered the dishes loudly enough to have woken her anyway. They ate quickly, looking at the ground tracking planner and guessing the extent of their travel time. The Doctor told them that his awareness of the temporal displacement was growing steadily but slowly, not enough of a factor to be a concern and that, ironically, it seemed the presence of the TARDIS was having a stabilizing effect. It made only more annoying that Acquintal Miros had been paranoid enough to deny them the timeship.

The darkness welcomed them again but the lights came on as soon as they were outside the door. Tegan looked around at the smooth, rounded gray walls for a camera, feeling peevish enough this morning that she wanted to do something rude into it. She adjusted the fit of the holster as they set out and found the darkness not quite as oppressive today for some reason. She glanced behind the Doctor's back as she walked by his side and caught Nyssa's eye. She jerked her head slightly at him unseen and Nyssa nodded in turn and offered her a fractional smile, which Tegan knew immediately meant he was doing somewhat better. She had seen Nyssa using the bioscanner out of his sight just before they'd left the latest set of crew quarters and thanked heaven that she had another woman to communicate with on their travels. There were many things Time Lords and men could do but unraveling the complex, silent messages of women was beyond the reach of either.

The stench of death met them after a few hours, a kill only a few days old; the young woman they had seen through the air vent earlier was sprawled in a puddle of thick blackened blood, face down in the juncture of a short hallway. Tegan looked up and down the brief length of it as Nyssa turned away. "Good place for an ambush, I guess. Not much room for a warning in either direction."

The Doctor nodded as he finished closing the eyes above the torn-open throat. "And they still have a rudimentary sense to work in teams. We may be dealing with a particularly nasty group this time if they're still about."

Nyssa moved away from the body slowly, beginning to hedge down the shortened hallway, "Why do you think the ones who did this are any worse off that the ones before now?" She was nervous, uncharacteristically resting her elegant hand on the butt of the pistol.

"Because the body is intact." the Doctor answered, standing slowly, one hand against the polished wall.

Tegan frowned in agreement and moved closer to him as they drew even with Nyssa and continued onward. "They've killed before for… food." Her eyes rolled in quiet horror, "but this time they killed to kill."

The Doctor, busy wiping his hand against his coat, met the eyes of both women. "Exactly, they seemed to have struck from more than the motivation of hunger. I can't imagine they killed her to have the body available for later. Of course, it could have been a random thing. She might have surprised them in the dark and they just reacted. I don't suppose we'll ever really know but best to be prepared that those who did this require us to be even more cautious."

And, of course, they were. Somehow. Tegan pulled her weapon and simply held it in her hand with the safety engaged. They slowed and listened for minutes at a time when reaching the "T"-junctures of the corridors that were open at both ends of the turns and when they were guided around the "L:-shaped bends took them on the outside so as to see down them as far as their guidelights would permit. Several times they heard scampering or howling but never in a way that was directed at them and twice they could see figures crouching in the darkness that ran when the lights came up. It was Nyssa, with her trained, scientific eye, who noticed the difference in the ones they were seeing as they neared the central chamber housing the unstable Temporal Initiation Field.

"Doctor, if I'm not mistaken, the deeper we go, the older these poor people seem."

Ever the teacher, he nodded. "Come to think of it, you're right. They do seem older. Why might that be?"

Nyssa thought for a moment, of cellular decay, of temporal mechanics, of genetic mutations, and such. "The chronomitic particles. They've developed a sort of radiation-induced progeria. If that's the case, depending on their life-spans, these people have less time than a few months or weeks. I doubt a medical team has been able to do even a scanned examination of the ones who are this deep. That would also explain their more violent tendencies, the effect of premature senile dementia, if their race suffers from such a thing." She hesitated for a moment and looked about, "I don't believe it should affect Tegan and myself because of our time in the TARDIS. Am I correct, Doctor?"

He nodded solemnly, pity in his eyes and anger. "Very. You've built a resistance to chronomitic influences because of experiencing temporal grace, and the TARDIS is able to sense all three of us because of our telepathic resonance with her. Doubtless she's doing what she can."

Tegan looked up at him then. "She can even sense me?"

The Doctor nodded, suddenly sheepish, his hand moving habitually to the back of his neck. "Unlike when we were back in the Console room, I can sense her awareness of you now, Tegan. She was aware of you through me before but she is familiar with your brain wave resonance now since you touched the synaptic interface. The TARDIS is watching out for all three of us. Glad to have a pair of friendly eyes as it were."

Tegan's own eyes narrowed and she stopped and looked around. "Should this Miros hear us talking about this? What if it puts the TARDIS in danger if he thinks we're getting any sort of help? He was paranoid enough before about her."

"Hmph, well, we don't know that he can hear us but obviously he knows where we are somehow because the guidelights shut down and reactivate outside of each crew quarter we use to rest. Nevertheless, he shouldn't be able to be a danger to the old girl, not with the security shields that I left in place."

Tegan's mouth twisted a bit. "And he shouldn't've been able to poison a Gallifreyan, either."

The Doctor's hand fell at that and after a look at the two women, they did indeed drop the subject, moving another few kilometers before they came upon the next subject worthy of discussion, a great deal of it. Tegan regarded the huge, jagged crack that ran the circumference the tunnel with determined frustration. It looked as if a giant's hand had grabbed the corridor on the outside and snapped it, then laid it roughly back into place. The lights, tiny and endless, that had guided them so very deep into the heart of Ecosia Beta stopped on the other side of it, all three trails of them. She bit her tongue and watched the Doctor as he examined the edges of the crack, no more than 10 or 12 centimeters apart but enough to have broken the circuit that carried the power.

Nyssa also remained silent but her eyes were searching the corridor behind them and forward as far as she could see for another set of doors. It was nearing the time they would have retired and it was perhaps best that they tackle this complication with some rest behind them. She was also looking for door that may have lead into any of the equipment rooms they were also now passing. If they could build a very rudimentary time machine they would certainly have something that could bridge a circuit, provided the code keys would let them into those rooms as well.

Tegan knelt down next to the Doctor as he rose back onto his knees. "What did this? An earthquake?"

"Well, a moonquake, one probably caused by the geologic stress of the time distortion. That should have eased once they regained partial control of the T.I. F. The circuits have been snapped clean, as has the strength member supporting this section of the tunnel." He pointed at the metal bar running just under the surface of the polished rock that served as walls, floor, and ceiling. "Ingenious really. They created a support system for the tunnels by inserting superheated coils into the stone and then pouring through the molten stone an amalgam of several metals with a higher specific density to reinforce the openings they were cutting." Looking closer in what little light they had, she could see that what had seemed like a metal bar running behind the rock actually was fused with it.

"And when this thing cracked, the power lines went with it?" She pointed at the tiny dead light immediately on the other side of the gap from its lit companion.

"Apparently so." The Doctor looked a bit grim but undefeated. "Even if we had some sort of portable illumination it wouldn't be enough to be warned if our Ecosian friends were about to spring upon us. We can't go forward without the lights being repaired even if the blast-corridors are shorter. It should be as simple as reconnecting the line as the right location."

If he'd been well, and she'd still been with him not of her own choice, Tegan would've had an answer for all the things that "should be" and ended up not. Instead she looked up at Nyssa as the other woman joined t hem but remained standing, rubbing her arms lightly against the chill. "I doubled back as far as I could. There is a set of quarters about sixty meters back and one of the small personal computers is there. Perhaps it would be of some use."

The Doctor stood up quickly, a smile on his face. "Good work but you shouldn't have gone alone."

Nyssa sighed very lightly. "We're running out of time, Doctor," she said quietly and turned to lead them back to the crew quarters. The computer was back in the living area and yielded quickly to the Doctor's fiddling courtesy of the small collection of tools in his pockets. Inside were several optical circuits but none large enough in itself to bridge the centimeters' wide gap they had examined.

"There's another problem," the Doctor commented as he fingered the handful of clear chips strung through with nearly invisible gold wires. "These are hardly sophisticated enough for industrial signal transfer. You'd need a much larger capacity element. They could melt in hours and leave us in the dark completely. In fact, I have no doubt they will."

Tegan frowned. She knew they couldn't press on under those circumstances but they had little choice. She came to her feet and looked around the set of rooms. Her eyes went from the computer to the kitchen area and she smiled for a moment before killing her own hopes. No sense letting them build up yet. "These people are a bit less advanced than Nyssa's or especially yours, Doc. Maybe we don't need a more fancy circuit, just a much bigger one." She pointed at the cooking unit between the sink and the freezer.

The Doctor looked at her quizzically for a moment, then the smile she had kept off her own face lit his and he stood, "Once again, Tegan… you take my breath away!" He leapt past her with energy they hadn't seen in days and immediately began tugging on the back of the cooking unit. It came free of the wall after the fourth tug and he was able to begin levering it downward. Tegan and Nyssa moved quickly to help him, sharp-tongued in their warnings to him as he exerted himself against the appliance. As they succeeded in lowering it, face front, to the ground, the needed heavier circuit came into view, a thick, black, round cable wired directly through the wall.

Tegan allowed herself a smile but stopped the Doctor when he reached for it. "Wait! Everything we've touched has worked down here. It's only been sitting a few months. That thing could be live. Isn't there some way to cut the power off?"

The Doctor stopped for a moment to address her concern, certain that there was no danger. "This should be perfectly safe. You doubtless recalled, as I should have, that your stoves and ovens on Earth need heavier voltages but they also had grounding circuits, and should here as well."

Tegan scowled but nodded at the same time and moved away as he gave a sharp yank and the cable came free, spitting sparks for a moment as the Doctor fell onto his backside and nearly collided with the table. He sat on the floor looking almost childish for a moment and smiled up at them. Another smart tug liberated the short but heavy cord from the back of the face-down cooking unit.

Ten minutes later they were back in the corridor, the Doctor on his knees and then on his stomach as he worked a narrow section of the cable he'd freed down into the opening, careful to keep the insulation between himself and the circuits. His voice, strained from his position and exertions reached them in breathy spurts as he cut and trimmed and adjusted the improvised linkage. "Ah, excellent. The diameters of the cable circuit… and the diameters of those embedded in the wall are the same… Now it just remains to find… the one carrying the signal for…" a thin stream of brightness rippled through the corridor before them, "for the lights."

Nyssa and Tegan returned his smile and watched as the lights came to life again under his skilled hands on the opposite side of the tunnel. Two thirds of the light had been returned to them but the trail of lights in the ceiling remained dark. Nyssa pulled on his arm as the Doctor looked up at them, his mind spinning through ways to insert the section of cord into the gap nearly three meters above them. "You've done enough, Doctor. We'll take on that one in the…. when we wake up."

Tegan took the other arm and shoved him back toward the crew quarters they had cannibalized. "Come on, that other microwave cooker thing is still fine. I can zap us some food in there. It's been a long day and half a long night or is your Time Lording circuit out of whack?"

Before they left the area, Nyssa set up two of the perimeter scanners, reasoning they should put up warning around the repairs since they didn't want the affected Ecosians near the improvised pieces that were in easy reach of curious fingers. She wondered briefly why they hadn't found any dead Ecosians near the still-live open circuits but then decided she didn't want to think about where they would've ended up.

The Time Lord was in front of them as they went back toward the crew quarters not so much to lead them but because he was reminded he would be pushed from behind otherwise. Nyssa produced the codekey and was about to open the door again when something shrieked not far away, not in pain or anything else that could have been anything but rage. Five of the demented Ecosians were edging into the long pool of light from the direction of the repair. They looked worse, older, broken-toothed and starved, days from turning on each other. Two of them were nearly naked. Nyssa gasped and fumbled with the lock as Tegan drew the weapon at her hip. The Doctor made eye contact with the leader of the group and never broke it as he shoved both women inside the opening door.

Tegan's quick preparation of food, and Nyssa's tending to the Doctor took place under the accompaniment of a nerve-wracking hour of banging and shrieking outside the door. Nyssa scored two sharp tears in the metal near the window and hung a black cloth from somewhere over it again, this time sealing the bottom, too, so that no light could ease around the sides. It took several minutes afterward for the noises to stop.

Nyssa glanced toward the silence and leaned on the countertop near the door. "I wonder if that's the range of their retention, twelve minutes or so."

Tegan looked up from the plates she was setting in front of the Doctor and the place for Nyssa. Hungry as a bear she had eaten herself while she was cooking, "As long as they're gone in the morning is all I care about. I don't fancy shooting my way through five of them and trying to fix it so that they won't eat one another." She left them to prepare herself to sleep, only dully realizing her timing was off several minutes later. She should've gotten ready last and saved the Doctor the trouble of maneuvering around Nyssa's finding out that Tegan had been asleep next to him. Tegan smiled thinly. Oh, well, what he didn't think she knew wouldn't hurt him and she wondered a little uncomfortably herself if Nyssa had seem them last night. It seemed so long ago after this day that she almost wouldn't have remembered it herself. She looked into the mirror over the sink in the bath and looked away.

It did feel like a month since she'd last rested but more than she remembered the time, she remembered her feelings, the rush in her gut as the Doctor had allowed her to hold him, his voice more felt than heard, the strange sensation of his skin warming against her own in the few places where it met. And then she fought to put the feelings aside, focusing on the necessity of what she was doing, knowing she ought not to confuse herself. It was easy enough when the Doctor hadn't known she was beside him but more confusing when he had not only permitted her nearness but welcomed it. She forced herself to remember that for this very brief time, he was vulnerable and likely to draw on any source of strength, herself included, more than even he was aware. Letting herself get confused would simply take advantage of him and worsen things when this was over. Knowing why he had withdrawn didn't make him any more likely to overcome it for her or anyone else. That was up to him, and certainly not something he should deal with in the middle of a desperate situation.

The Time Lord had worked out the timing for her regardless, going into the bath last and emerging to find Nyssa dead asleep and Tegan forcing herself to stay awake in the bottom bunk as she waited. She knew he was still uncomfortable with the whole arrangement, needed or not, and took the initiative when he emerged, his hair damp and already shivering as he stood not looking at her, seeming befuddled and so deceptively young in his striped trousers and untucked shirt. Tegan stood and dropped onto the wide bunk opposite the one where she'd been sitting beneath Nyssa's. She was still wearing her cleaned tank top and trousers and would have been comfortable ditching them but didn't want a dead Time Lord on her hands. She rolled back against the wall and bunched the blankets into her hand.

"Come on, it's been a really long day. You need to rest." She made it n statement and an order, her voice quiet but with its bossiest edge, as if she were distancing herself from the situation, reminding him of the reasons she could so well aggravate him. Her tone and the fact that she wasn't really looking at him made things a bit easier as she expected. The Doctor put his back to her has he sat down on the edge of the bed, his eyes on Nyssa's still form. He lay down slowly, becoming more aware of his tiredness as he did. He wondered how the Humans and other races that lacked a Gallifreyan's usual stamina put up with this business of needing sleep. When his head finally reached the pillow, he realized Tegan's arm was under the curve of his neck. Overridden by his emotional tension, which admittedly was nothing like it had been the first two nights, the muscles there began to relax immediately as they were touched by the wave of heat from his companion's arm. The Doctor closed his eyes and reached his outer hand across his chest to take hold of Tegan's as she pulled the covers and the thermal blanket over them both.

Tegan turned on her side slightly when the Doctor took her hand and kept hold of it as her free arm coiled against his near shoulder, spooning against him at an angle made slightly awkward because of their heights. She crooked the arm under his neck and brushed her fingertips over his forehead. "It's just me, Doc. Just Tegan. Rest. We're another day closer and you're still the clever bastard you always were."

"I'm afraid you were the clever one this time. I was only the repairman," he answered quietly, his eyes closing as the heat slowly built up from Tegan's body. She felt the muscles of his back spasming as they relaxed. The heat wasn't quite to the point yet where he could begin to lower himself into the healing trance and he was almost too tired to start it but needed to stay awake until he could. "What made you think there would be a heavier line leading into the cooking unit?" He was asking more to stay awake than anything now, but did want to know.

Unseen, Tegan scowled at the bottom of the top bunk. "I was late getting to the airport my first day on the job because my Aunt Vanessa was going to have her range installed that morning. She wanted to be there for the bloke to put it in and we ended up rushing. The range was sitting half-way out in the kitchen with this great big plug hanging off it. I wonder if the people who ended up with her flat had it put in."

The Doctor opened his eyes and turned his head, trying to meet Tegan's gaze but unable; she was staring off into the middle distance with a firmness working its way back into her chin. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be, Doc. She was killed by a monster you were trying to stop. That's part of the reason I stayed to help you after you regenerated. I didn't know what was going on on Logopolis aside from a bunch of math but I'd figured out no court on Earth was ever going to bring the Master to justice. We might not have gotten him but we wrecked his plan to wreck the Universe. I'll take that for something until he's done for." She looked down at him then. He certainly didn't look like a man ready to chase down monsters at the moment but he would recover and be his annoying, almost inexhaustible, lecturing self as soon as this was over... and she'd meant it about owing her a dinner and meeting some fascinating, rational, decent people, the sort reflected in the mind of the TARDIS.

The Doctor tightened his grip on Tegan's hand, felt the life pulsing through it, like fire beneath satin. He suddenly knew he wouldn't dare open his eyes and was glad Tegan couldn't detect the pheromonal shift of his body, one he was too tired to have been aware of and control till now. Or could she subconsciously? He could still tell she was watching him closely and the hand touching his forehead now occasionally tugged lightly at his hair. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt the normal changes that happened in these situations but he found he was only making a one-hearted attempt to get them under control. There was too much going through his mind at once, not simply because of Tegan's nearness but the reminder that the heat emanating from her was because she was Human. Human, with only one life to spend on her existence, and she had chosen to spend part of that one life defying the Galaxy's evils with him.

Few things could motivate someone to such a decision. Revenge was one side of that coin and it nearly terrified him to think about the other, that he might have so little time left to let that other touch him again, and that he was sure that Tegan was likely no longer here out of revenge. This change, this enforced contact, had been so easy for her and she had gone out of her way to make it easy for him. The old confusion returned with the reminder of his sudden mortality, one that helped quell the older feelings stirring within him again. "How do you stand it?" He said suddenly, disjointedly, and Tegan's hand on his head, trying to coax him rest, stopped for a moment.

"Stand what?"

The Doctor did open his eyes then, meeting her dark ones squarely even as he watched her fingers move, not admitting to himself that he could see her pupils were dilated beyond what the darkness would have called for and the heat coming from her was more than it would have normally been had she been alone or that her own scent had changed. "Dealing with… death, with it being so close? Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the latest bit of trouble that I forget those of you who are with me aren't facing the same fate I normally might… to simply regenerate or I just press on assuming I'll be able to keep everything on course. If someone stopped me and asked, well, of course I know what could happen but…"

"Doc, stop it. You're exhausted; you're not used to that. You've been poisoned. We've been in this badly-lit horror flick for days now and Adric's not long been gone." She sighed and shook her head. "I can't speak for everyone who's ever bummed a ride in the TARDIS but if I get knocked off tomorrow I'll have had a life that most people couldn't imagine and seen things billions never will. How many air hostesses can say they've boarded flights to other planets?"

He laughed quietly, his eyes still closed, and it shook both of them in the growing warmth. "I think she told my father the same thing when she left with him," he said quietly, his consciousness slipping down into the healing trance.

Tegan looked down at the semi-conscious Time Lord, curious as she started to finally fall asleep herself. He'd never mentioned his family before and she had a rule about family that extended to everyone much less the Doctor: Never ask unless invited. She guessed she'd been invited. "When who left with him?"

The Doctor turned toward her, opening his eyes for one last time before retreating, "When my mother left Earth with him."

"Left… Earth?"

The Doctor smiled slightly and turned away from Tegan but only so that he could back toward her warmth more closely, his backside nestled up against her thighs. "Yes, yes, left Earth. I don't suppose I ever told you… My mother was Human."

Tegan came awake and her breath caught in her throat; her eyes fell to the top of the now-blond head down from her own. Too many implications went through her head, too many pieces suddenly fit. Despite her exhaustion she lay awake for a time, until the Doctor's cool breath on her arm had become almost as warm as her own.


	10. Chapter 10

Nyssa remained still after she'd woken to the muffled voices of her friends'. She felt guilty for unintentionally eavesdropping but anything else would have made the situation worse, especially now that the Doctor was, at the same time, growing more symptomatic and more comfortable with the respite Tegan provided. Of course, she had known the Doctor's mother was Human; she had given him an extensive examination during the few more peaceful parts of their journey to Castrovalva as he floated peacefully in the now-jettisoned Zero Room. She also knew that Tegan had or would soon put the pieces together that his parentage meant compatibility on both physical and genetic levels. But the revelation also told her that the Doctor was far from himself, and unaccustomed to the symptoms of exhaustion; he was going to be very ill-at-ease, perhaps, if or when he realized what his muttered comment would imply, especially at the time and place he spoken it.

Nyssa sighed quietly and once again made sure she was the last to rise. She needed the extra sleep regardless after the time she had spent contemplating her two friends and the journey they might take beyond this one. Such an unexpected complication, she thought wearily, as she headed out of the door behind them, back into the flickering darkness. The walls of the tunnel seemed closer "today", as if her musings had trapped them in a situation beyond the one already holding them in thrall. She wondered as much what was going through Tegan's mind as she catered to the ramblings of her own. She was angry with herself that she was having trouble concentrating on what change to the formula they now had for the Doctor would result in a permanent antidote. Even that was a distraction, she had to admit to herself. Without a Gallifreyan medical lab at her disposal, there was very little she could do here, walking through a darkness that seemed as bleak as Space itself and now… focusing on Tegan's example didn't seem to help as much.

It was an hour into their journey that they came upon an open room that they hadn't opened themselves; that in itself made it worth their exploration. It was large, circular and occupied by a large machine made mostly of an expansive empty chamber surrounded by a few small consoles and the remains of open containers and small bones. This time even Tegan knew what it was. "Let's get out of here; it must be where they send down the food. It might be feeding time any minute. Come on." She tugged at the Doctor's sleeve and when he didn't move, sighed angrily and went back to the door of the room, gun in hand. "What are you doing?" She hissed back at the two scientists. Moments later they joined her at the door and the Doctor put up a patient hand to ward off her comments.

The Time Lord closed the distance between them quickly, glancing back at the debris-cluttered apparatus. "I wanted to find out why our host didn't simply let us transmat at least this far. The machine isn't set for living matter. It's probably also why they haven't lured the inhabitants here and brought them out. Pity. I think it could be converted with a simple upgrade to the ---."

"That's great. Let's talk away from here… Please." Tegan gave him one last impatient look and moved off. He glanced back at the open room and followed her, ushering Nyssa before him, noticing that she was eager herself to get away. She had developed a broadened respect for Tegan's opinion in the last few days, understandably so, and it was perhaps wise to leave the area where they were guaranteed at some point to encounter more Ecosians, ones already drawn by hunger.

"By offering to upgrade that transmat, we can give this Miros a way to help these people. Perhaps we can convince him to send some medical teams down and then stun them and return them as they arrive for food. That way they won't be in danger from one another."

Tegan looked up at the Doctor as she moved, still on edge from the nearness of the food source and clearing the rank smell of it from her nose. "Good idea but we'll do that after you're okay. We don't really have a choice."

Nyssa was glancing about herself, grimacing when something screeched behind them and something else answered. "No, we don't but we will insist he take action. If they were advanced enough to develop a drug to affect the Doctor, we have enough expertise with temporal biophysical degeneration that we should be able to add to that knowledge and help them. It's only a small chance. Right now we know nothing of their biology but the symptoms are superficially the same as most other species."

"Well, if they have a chance, you and the Doctor can give them the best one. If we can get past Miros and reach the families of these people… tell them what kind of conditions they're in, that ought to help. I don't get the feeling he's got a lot of the hometown crowd on his side, if he did why resort to blackmail and three aliens to unmake his mess, even if he needed a Time Lord?"

Nyssa shook her head quickly. "Yes, he said he owned this moon, not ruled it or controlled it. Taken in the usual sense that implies a capitalistic government, a democracy or socialist one where all the people would be more accessible. They may also not know the danger he's put them in with this failure. Even if he has control, making others aware of that would certainly cause enough animosity to force his hand to help these people."

"We'll find him first when we leave. His wife may have a thing or two to say to him, too, I'll bet, and she'll know where to find him."

The Doctor listened to them talk, applying themselves to a solution for the miseries of the trapped Ecosians even as they stood ready to defend themselves against them. Cruel irony again. He had returned his weapon to Tegan when they had discovered that the Ecosians were unlikely to die from the blast, by design or some providence of their predicament. The women's voices were low and familiar and he was able to screen them out as he listened for the sounds of pursuit or ambush ahead of them or above them. He stopped them when the noises inevitably came, from the corridor ahead, just beyond the perimeter of the light provided to them. He pointed to the opening of the corridor they could just barely see and Tegan raised her weapon as they side-stepped their way to the opposite side of the corridor. Tegan growled to herself and looked at the ground, only then realizing the other disadvantage of the diffuse and indirect lighting, there were no shadows, no way to keep perspective on her aim if she were moving and shooting at the same time. She understood perspective from her drawing. It had helped her when Uncle Walter was teaching her to shoot; she'd known how to look at the target, see the angle as if she were drawing it in motion. The source of light would help her determine where to put the shadows, now it would have helped her know where to put the shot. She was still waiting for the unseen target when something grabbed her arm, a hand she knew immediately did not belong to the Doctor or Nyssa. It was rough and painful and attached to the arm of something that had been lying in wait in the corridor across from the one they'd been cautiously approaching.

As fast as it grabbed her, the Doctor grabbed it, the hand of an Ecosian belonging to a man a good deal smaller but with the strength of the mad. He tightened his grip on her arm and dragged it toward his opening, crag-toothed mouth. Tegan grabbed her own wrist with her other arm. Nyssa's gun was moving back and forth, trying to get a clear shot at the Ecosian and still cover the hallway where the others might still be waiting. She looked at the Doctor in confusion when he yelled sharply at the Australian woman struggling against him and the Ecosian both. "Let go, Tegan!"

"What!"

"Trust me! Let go!"

Her better judgment screaming, she released the arm tugging her hand away from the filthy, claw-nailed grip of the madman. As she did the Doctor pulled it sharply in the same direction the Ecosian had been pulling and snapped Tegan's fist, still tightened around the butt of the gun, into his temple. His grip released a moment later and the Ecosian collapsed to the ground. Tegan looked down at him as she rubbed her fist and then up at the Doctor. He was smiling brightly and recovering his breath as he reached to tap her flushed nose. "See what happens when we work together."

Tegan stared up at him, listening at the warring halves of her brain. "You used my fist to hit him?"

The Doctor almost laughed, "And you wouldn't have?"

"Well, I…", she shrugged suddenly and couldn't think of an argument except that she would've wanted to do it herself and that seemed just a bit childish. She settled for a thin smirk. "I told you you were still a clever bastard," she said and shared a half-witted look with Nyssa as they fired a few shots at the roofs of the tunnels, enough to cover them side to side, then dropped the unconscious Ecosian into a nearby room and sealed it. The Doctor glanced down the corridor opposite them where the original threat had been.

"I wonder if they're working together or that was mere opportunism. The others didn't – oh, dear…"

Tegan turned to look behind them, weapon raised and Nyssa turned to look at the Doctor. "What is it?"

"When I say "run"…"

"Oh crikey…."

"Run!"

They did, six Ecosians pursuing them as they reached the far end of the lit corridor, ones who had moved back out of sight when the diversion had failed. They reached the next juncture in a few seconds and made the turn down the closer of corners. The lights moved with them but it took several moments for the Doctor and Tegan to realize they were alone. They caught a brief glimpse of Nyssa as she vanished down the corridor they were now in on the opposite side of the intersection. Nyssa's side of the gray hallway was plunged into darkness as soon as she was approximately 100 meters away from the Doctor. The heard her startled gasp and got a last glimpse of her as she moved against the wall. Tegan shoved the Doctor against the wall in their own corridor as soon as she saw the lights go black around Nyssa. "Stay here! You trust me!"

And he did, knowing what she was thinking after a few shaky moments then resigning himself to being bait. So, this is what it was like. How many times had he been forced to put companions, most of whom had volunteered he had to admit, in the same situation? He wondered again about Leela as Tegan disappeared into her own pool of blackness once she was far enough away from him. He backed to the far side of the corridor and watched with some trepidation as Tegan's shots, delivered from the darkness beyond him, felled three of the Ecosians as they scrambled toward him. The others broke off and ran, headed into the blackness that had surrounded Nyssa.

The Doctor bolted after them, cursing himself for being unarmed and looking in relief at Tegan as she caught up with him. The pool of light triggered by the Doctor's presence moved with them quickly as it had moved with them slowly. After a few hundred yards down the three nearby corridors that intersected the ones Nyssa had taken, they stopped, looking about with growing alarm, calling for Nyssa through the echoing bleakness. She could never have gone forward no farther and there was nowhere else for her to go. They searched each room, both crew quarters and the storage areas that were now beginning to appear with greater frequency, using the codekey still in the Doctor's possession, finding no one. Silence and the occasional howl were their only answers as they considered every reasonable possibility and explored it. They halted their search only when The Doctor, fist clutching his chest, had finally gone to his knees at Tegan's side.

Tegan retreated back through the door quickly once the perimeter alarms were in place. Outside the rooms she and the Doctor had taken, the dim strings of lights remained the only source of brightness Tegan could see, lighting up the better part of the short corridor. The perimeter alerts would not only tell them if the Ecosians approached but would also tell Nyssa where they had finally been forced to rest. With a final shout of the younger woman's name and a slow look in either direction, Tegan shut the door and engaged the electronic bolts. She leaned against it for a moment, knowing the Doctor couldn't see her and gave in to a few silent sobs before going to the sink and throwing cold water on her face and holding a wrapped cube of ice to her eyes to end the puffiness and redness. It had fallen to her to be strong for all of them and now was simply the time to remember all the worse scrapes they'd survived. Having few skills to match those of the Doctor and the others who had traveled with them, even she had managed to defy their enemies a few times. Surely Nyssa would have a better chance than she to do so and she was armed.

Tegan had to calm herself all over again when she caught a glimpse of the four, finger-shaped bruises on her right arm.

She was composed when she walked into the sleeping quarters some few minutes later, a plate in her hand for the Doctor. She lied and told him she'd eaten already when, in fact, she had barely managed to graze a bit as she fixed a few slices of what looked like deer meat and some leaved vegetable that tasted like it was already dusted with pepper. She'd actually liked it, counting it as the only pleasant surprise they'd encountered so far. She pulled her sleeve back down to cover the bruises before she reached the Doctor.

He was sitting up on the low bunk bed, just where she'd left him once they were inside so he wouldn't have to move again. Tegan dug deep and put on her bossiest tone. "Eat. You know you're in rough shape already. Don't do it for you, do it for Nyssa." Her tone retreated to one of reason and determination. "We'll find her in the morning and then get moving again. We should almost be there and then we can get these people some help and the Hell out of this system."

The Doctor took the plate of cut meat and shredded pepperleaf and the three-pronged fork from her slowly and nodded. Tegan was right and he hoped it carried through the plan she had laid out for them. She left him to eat and went back to the kitchen area, managing to take in bit more herself of the pepperleaf. She walked over to the door and looked out of the small window again, raising on her toes and twisting around for a better view as she saw movement at the end of the corridor. Picking up one of the weapons from the counter, she opened the door for a better look, her hopes dashed when she realized the movements she'd seen were only more of the Ecosians, down at the far end of the corridor from which they'd come. There were five of them, huddled around something on the floor. Suddenly there was a short-lived but agonized scream and the flurry of activity around the object on the floor changed, as did the howls echoing off the smooth, round walls. Tegan leapt back and slammed the door, her already tired heart pounding as she locked the door then sagged forward onto the counter, trying to banish from her mind the sound of the Ecosian being killed.

She held back the tears for nearly a minute, and then bit her lip and sobbed in silence, wondering how much longer she could hold out, especially if something had happened to Nyssa. She lowered her head onto her crossed arms and let the exhaustion and nervous tension flow from her. Several minutes passed before she started slightly at the cool arm that was across her shoulders. She stood and let the Doctor turn her into his embrace and they passed the next few minutes in silence as Tegan calmed down and the emotional tension was put back in its place. She lifted her head and fell into a chair in front of her untouched plate with an appetite that was partially returned and looked over at the Doctor as he slowly sat down across from her, his own empty plate having been placed on the counter.

"One of the Ecosians we stunned, or the one we hit, the others just killed him. I couldn't see it but I heard it. I thought I heard something that it might be Nyssa, and I opened the door just in time to hear him scream. I guess the only thing to be thankful for is that they still kill each other instead of eating each other alive."

The Doctor looked more than physically uncomfortable for a moment. Tegan had once again cut to the heart of the matter, and faced the bitter reality of Ecosia Beta with her usual emotional outburst, followed by a stolid acceptance. He offered her a second larger silver lining for the dark cloud and cursed irony again. "There is one more thing… If they're distracted with less able-bodied prey, they'll be far less interested in Nyssa."

The woman looked up at him with disgust and relief on her face at the same time, her expression much like he himself was feeling. "I hope she's far enough away to be spared the dinner show. The entertainment stinks on this planet."

"We'll find her, Tegan. I can still sense her; she's alive but--."

"But what?"

"But it's very vague."

"Well, that's something. At least she's alive, maybe somewhere safe. She had another key."

"True, but we checked every room into the tunnel where she headed and those in a reasonable distance which joined it. I can't imagine where she'd be. We would have seen her if she doubled back."

"There has to be a logical explanation. If that's the case, I might not find it but you will and then we'll get going and get this over with."

The Doctor smiled slightly, "If it's an explanation that requires common sense, then you'll have to be the one that discovers it. Mine seems to abandon me at times."

"No comment. Promise me when we get out of here you'll take us to the most godforsaken, unpopulated, quiet place in the Universe that has enough sunlight to melt Antarctica."

"Fair enough. I have the perfect place in mind. No one's seen it in eight millennia, unless you count seventy-eight species of butterflies and thirty-two species of parrots that sound like songbirds instead of shrieking."

Tegan smiled as she stood up and tossed the empty plates back on the sink. "What's it called?"

"That's the best part. It isn't called anything. I believe I may have been the only person ever to see it, until a week or so from now. It'll take time to get there even in the TARDIS."

"Sounds perfect. Let's just make sure we don't leave any trouble for the place. First maniac that shows up, you're heading right back in the TARDIS and leaving him spinning his wheels."

"Fair enough," he answered and then slowly followed her up, leaning heavily on the table as he brought his legs out from under the small table. Tegan came out from around the counter and supported him as they went back to the sleeping area, feeling slightly strange. It was harder and easier that they were alone as they prepared to try and rest for what was passing as night. On the surface of the planet it was sometime late morning if one counted time on a bleak worldlet with a painfully slow rotation.

Tegan thought about the thermal blankets being with Nyssa, along with all of their other gadgets when she looked at the wide bottom bunk. She reached up onto the one above it and pulled down the two blankets there to add to the ones where she and the Doctor would be resting. She'd just straightened them out and sat down when the Doctor emerged from the bath, still moving slowly, his eyes taking in the bright green interior of the room, complimented by a few small nautical decorations. Unsurprisingly the vast seas on their homeworld played an important part in their lives. He was still looking at the painting of a large sailing vessel when his right leg locked up and he fell forward, snapping a hand out to the top bunk to catch himself at the same time as Tegan's hands seized his waist from her seat on the bed and proceeded to guide him down beside her.

"What's wrong?"

"My legs cramped up, just after I sat down in the other room. I'm afraid the running about has made things worse."

Tegan shook her head and reached around to the back pocket of her pants, producing on of the spray injectors. "Go on, lay down. I remember what Nyssa showed me." He complied as she adjusted the dosage and noted there were only two more after this one. That meant they were definitely close as Nyssa had prepared each injector with the full number of dosages needed to get the Doctor through to the unstable chamber. She twisted around to find him lying flat but with the creases at the corners of his eyes drawn tight. He didn't react as she rolled up his pant leg and gently felt along the back of his knee until she found the most pliant spot, one where she could get a slight pulse. She replaced her warm fingers with the pad of the pressure injector and delivered half the dosage and then repeated her actions on the other leg. He relaxed visibly and sank further onto the bed as she began working to further loosen the muscles in his calves from the outside. She wondered how her hands could still be so strong as tired as she felt.

Tegan looked up ten minutes or so later and saw that some of the youth had returned to the Doctor's face and his head had fallen slightly to the side. His eyes didn't open but his head came back to center when she switched positions so that she could lift his near leg across her lap. His breath caught slightly as her hands began working at the muscles in his right thigh. She met his gaze when he did open his eyes narrowly and began the litany that had reached him before. "It's just me, Doc, just Tegan, the crazy one who came back." He smiled, almost laughed, and his eyes closed once more as her touch became more familiar, her gentle chatter hypnotic. Her scent began to change again as her hands moved further up his leg but her touches remained strong and medical in nature and she stopped as soon as the muscles had unlocked under the influence of the drug and her hands.

She folded his leg back and braced his ankle against her backside as she lifted the other leg and repeated the same treatment, feeling along its length and starting where the tightness was greatest and working outward. Tegan smiled thinly when she realized from his almost non-existent breathing and knew that he was falling into the healing trance again. She began to ease down beside him and pulled the four sets of heavy blankets over them both but hesitated before lying down completely. Several seconds passed before the Doctor opened his eyes and looked at the indecision in the woman's before she met his gaze. "What's wrong?"

Tegan lowered her eyes and then raised them to look at the empty bunk across from them, seeming sheepish for a moment and then resolving it. "I know this isn't easy for you. Nyssa isn't here for tonight; I can fix it so I can sleep over there."

The Doctor lay still for a moment, confused by her implication about Nyssa's absence, not sure if it were because Nyssa would not have to tolerate the heat if she turned up the thermostat, or if, since they were alone, it would be easier to avoid the possibilities provided by their sudden privacy. The Doctor dismissed the second notion quickly, and with some embarrassment within himself. It only proved how affected he was to think Tegan would be engaging in carnal thoughts while Nyssa was separated from them and possibly in danger. Only the poisoning let him forgive himself for that thought, but it had brought the young woman's absence foremost in his mind again. He looked up at Tegan and reached out from under the blankets to take hold of the arm bracing her upright, "If it's not an imposition, Tegan, please stay. I need to know I can keep at least one companion safe."

Tegan took a sudden breath, shaking her head as she lay down beside him, her eyes on his face. "You never said much after Adric died. You vanished for almost three weeks. We needed you as much as we were worried about you, we even wondered if you'd… if you'd… let something happen to yourself. You were understanding enough for us later, but it was almost like it'd never happened for you when you came back."

The Doctor looked away from her, slightly horrified. "You thought I had harmed myself, on top of all that had happened to you both already? Good Lord, Tegan, I'm sorry. I didn't think, I couldn't really, so it never occurred to me that either of you would think such a thing."

"I didn't, at first, but Nyssa couldn't sense you any longer after about three days. We searched and couldn't find you, and the TARDIS was unstable and kept changing so much we gave up. It gave us something to concentrate on, that and the power failures. You never did say what you were doing or what went on but the power failures stopped after you came back."

The Doctor's eyes stared off into the distance despite the fact that the only view available was the bottom of the top bunk; he took a breath and turned his head toward the Earthwoman without seeing her. "I was in the temporal core of the TARDIS, trying to find a way to do what I told you and Nyssa I couldn't, a way to save him that wouldn't violate the Laws of Time. It took me ten days to run all the parameters, to resolve for myself that there was no way. The TARDIS was reluctant to help me; that was the source of the power fluctuations. I kept rerouting things. In the end she only did because she knew I would have no peace otherwise."

Tegan found her eyes were filling with tears again, "You were trying to save him. I'm sorry for snapping at you all those times over it. Why didn't you say something?"

The blue eyes focused on her now, seeing her clearly in the half-light even as the exhaustion began to catch up with him again and, his restraint now compromised, gave her a glimpse of his private hell. "It was simpler; I didn't want you to know how many times I had to watch him die."

During her time traveling with the Doctor, in her times running from monsters and madmen, Tegan had felt her heart pounding against her sides more times than she cared to remember, had felt it heating her body for flight, had felt it pound the blood through her ears to the exclusion of all other sound. Only now did she feel it stop, just for moment as her breath caught in her throat and the tears spill from her eyes again to land, untouched upon the Time Lord's face as she leaned over him. She had to remember to breathe and her voice returned a moment later. "Oh, Doctor, we should have trusted you, should've taken your word there was no way and not driven you to go through that. It must've nearly put you out of your mind."

"Less than if I hadn't tried. You're not to blame for my doing so, and it was the only way I could accept what happened."

He turned toward her, slowly taking the hand resting between them, his voice became rough with emotion suddenly, a revisited grief that had awoken to be shared. "He went back. He figured it out and he went back. He missed the last real calculation, you see. He thought he had time."

Tegan shook her head slowly and strangely smiled. "I know. Somehow I always knew." She used the arm she had slid beneath the Doctor's neck to cradle his head and lift it toward her and pressed a long, gentle kiss against his forehead, her tears touching his face again as they slowly dried. The Doctor turned toward her further without encouragement or any needed invitation to settle into her embrace, reassured by the blurred impression of Nyssa still in his mind. Tegan's hand moved slowly across his back, helping to relax the tightened muscles as her gentle breaths stirred through his hair. Beneath his ear a single, steady heartbeat drowned out the voices of centuries of ghosts.

Nyssa had patched herself up quite well, stopping the bleeding with a garlic-like spice she had found in the cupboard. The blood on her hands had vanished into it as if it were cotton almost instantly and so she had taken the chance and put a good amount of it on the cut near her right temple and searched for something to tone down the swelling. She found some ice and very quietly packed it into a towel and held it to her head for a few minutes. During the time that she took it down, she rooted even more quietly through the satchel she had managed to keep with her and found something for the pain in her head. It was nothing that would likely help the Doctor and so she ran a glass of water and took the tablets herself. In moments the pressure was gone and she relaxed enough to take inventory of her situation.

She had a head wound and possibly a slight concussion but the damage had only been enough to knock her out for a few hours. Her knee was sore from the fall but not in a way that would hinder her continuing with her companions. At least she was safe again from the Ecosians. Two narrow escapes after her separation from Tegan and the Doctor had nearly convinced her she would never be able to face them again but some rest (much of it enforced) and a meal had restored her spirits. She hadn't been as good a cook with the more primitive implements as had Tegan, but the food had been acceptable and satisfying. She wished she hadn't slept as much on the floor of the kitchen area of the crew quarters but she considered herself lucky to be alive at all. She had only retained consciousness long enough kick the door shut and hear it seal.

She put the ice to her head again and noticed that there was now very little new blood on the light blue towel that she had used. Whatever the spice was, it was effective as a coagulant and stung only a bit. Chances are it would even have antibiotic properties. Now her goal would be to get the swelling down and to get some rest since she could do so safely, as well as get the caked blood from her hair. She moved quietly into the bath and gingerly used a rag to remove most of it, careful not to start any new bleeding. She sat down on the edge of the tub, slightly dizzy, and held the ice to her head again for several minutes before standing up and returning to the bunk room. She loosened her clothing as best she could and then settled down on the bed and pulled one of the blankets over her, the ice-filled towel held to her head for a few minutes more before she let herself rest.

As a child in the great palace on Traken, she had learned how to move quickly and quietly, stealing around corners to hear the latest intrigues of adults as she was trained to someday engage in them herself. It had become a game to see who could get past the guards the most quickly and remained undiscovered, or better, to go completely undiscovered and then slip back past the guards to report to her friends what she had heard and about whom. She had become the best of them at this bit of cloak and dagger and it had served her well in her adventures with the Doctor.

It had served her again an hour or so prior when she had finally resumed her search for the Doctor and Tegan, her way lit by the torch she had made from a table leg and cut strips of blanket fabric soaked in cooking oil from the kitchen. It had been as much a deterrent as the laser weapon at her side, she'd found. The regressing minds of the trapped Ecosians feared fire more than a modern gun. It had taken her less than twenty minutes searching to find the red glow of the perimeter sensors and then slip silently into the rooms where the Doctor and Tegan rested and slept respectively. She smiled at them now with relief and decided not to wake them. They had exhausted themselves searching for her, no doubt, and since they were both at rest, they would be just as happy upon waking to find her as they would if she disturbed them now, even with good news. The Doctor had doubtless done himself some damage trying to find her, probably collapsing before Tegan had brought him here to rest. Nyssa carefully erected shields around her mind to keep the Doctor from detecting her nearness but to reassure him at the same time. She would never have been able to fool him under normal circumstances but was grateful she could for now. She saw it begin to work after a few minutes. Some of the tension left him and he sagged more heavily against Tegan.

Tegan came half awake a few hours later, hot beneath the four layers of blankets but cool where the Doctor lay against her. She ran her hand along his back and felt the muscles there twitching only slightly. They stopped when her hand stayed more than a few minutes. By her estimate they should only have one more "night" to need to do this, or looking at it another way, to leap from the frying pan into the fire of a messed up time machine. If the Doctor's people had been doing it for millennia and still botching time travel, these idiots must have done the job royally. She wondered, not for the first time, why they'd even tried it. If they knew about Gallifrey, they must've known they were going to be stopped or perhaps they thought burying it in the middle of a moon would keep their project hidden. She doubted that. Even in her very brief time traveling with the Doctor, she knew that the energy it took to time travel was too enormous for one miserable little moon to hide. She still wasn't even sure how big the TARDIS was inside, only that she wished she were inside it again, finding something flashy to wear in the massive closet, or swimming in the pool, or just in her own bright, feminine room with Harry Potter keeping her mind off their own adventures. She adjusted the covers again with her free hand and arched her chin up to settle her head further up on the pillow, taking a deep breath of the cool air.

It roused her slightly even as she tried to return to sleep, and Tegan wiggled what little she could to try and get more comfortable. It took her a moment to register what sounded like another set of breaths. She kept calm, thinking it had to be her imagination or a wheeze in the ventilation system. If one of the Ecosians had managed to get past the door she'd known was locked then they would certainly have attacked long before now. Screwing up her courage, she opened her eyes and looked toward the vent near the floor to see if the circular sounds of the air could be timed with the flapping of the blanket tails across from them.

The only rush of air Tegan heard next was her own muffled gasp as she looked at the bunk across from them and saw Nyssa sleeping peacefully in the dim light. She looked well enough but there was what appeared to be a small wet towel on the floor next to the bed that had a few dark stains on it. Tegan thought about rousing the Doctor but then reconsidered; it had taken a long time for her to help him fall into the healing trance, and his even more shallow breathing now told her he was actually asleep. She had learned to tell the difference in the times they had spent like this; in the healing trance his breaths were long and slow and, if far from regular, more frequent, asleep he barely breathed at all. And the actual sleep never lasted more than a few hours even now. Tegan didn't mind the extra surge of heat as a delighted flush passed through her but it was impossible to return to sleep while she waited for her friends to wake. Nyssa would have some story to tell about where she'd been and how they'd missed her in their long search.

Something close to three hours passed before the Doctor drew in a few of the longer, deeper breaths that he took before waking and noticed with some surprise that his arm was around Tegan's middle. He lifted his head to look at her and saw that there seemed to be a smile on her lips and what little he could sense of her thoughts, which had actually quadrupled since their encounter with the Mara, was settled and peaceful. He coiled his arm back and then lifted his head to look down at her only to have her open her eyes the moment he did, obviously wide awake. The Doctor smiled thinly and looked at the wall behind them. "How long have you been lying there?"

Tegan smiled up at him, her eyes strangely bright. "A few hours, about as long as you've actually been asleep."

"I'm sorry."

"For what? Silly Time Lord. I have a surprise for you."

The Doctor's shy smile broadened slightly. "How unsurprising. What is it, Tegan?"

She pointed to her left and behind him and watched his face as he turned on his back and saw Nyssa sleeping across from them, seeming little worse for wear. He rose up on his elbows for a moment to stare at her before settling back down with a relieved huff. "Thank goodness. She must've found us during the night."

Tegan nodded. "I came half awake when you fell asleep and thought I heard something wrong with the vent system; it was Nyssa breathing. She's probably got quite a story to tell."

"Yes, I imagine so. I'd hate to wake her, though. It'll surely have been difficult."

"I'll bet. I guess the best thing we can do is just get some more rest. We'll need it soon."

They learned just how difficult it had been for Nyssa a few hours later, eating a hefty breakfast after the Doctor had satisfied himself that her wounds needed only time to heal. Nyssa was as concerned about him in return but knew that she had shown Tegan enough to have given him proper care during her enforced absence and he had rebounded much after finding her back safe with them. Neither had even rebuked her for not waking them. She kept her tone matter-of-fact as she relayed the talk of her separation, nightmarish as it had been, running from madmen in the darkness, hoping not to concern them more.

"After I went down the opposite corridor, just before the lights went out, I saw one of the Ecosians who had been behind us closing on me. I used the codekey to enter a room very near to the edge of the corridor and lock it but he remained too close. I actually saw you both go past me but he would've gotten to me even before you could've turned around. You were both moving so fast I don't think you even saw him. Eventually he ran off, I think to join the others in killing one of the ones you were forced to stun. I left to rejoin you a while later, could just barely hear you shouting for me, and another three of them appeared. They were horrible, covered in blood, nearly feral. I shot two of them but the third I missed and he got near enough to knock the gun from my hand while I was struggling with the codekey to get into a nearby door. Unfortunately, where I'd been forced to run I'd had to double back, away from where you were looking for me."

Frustrated realization creased the Doctor's face for a moment and he clattered the cup to the tabletop, sloshing the second cup of tea over his fingers. "I never thought… good heavens, I'm sorry Nyssa. We only ever saw you go forward."

Nyssa gave a small shrug and a pale smile. "You would've had no reason to know, and that happened the second time I was out in the corridor, far enough away that you couldn't have reached me. In any case, I was in such a rush to get into the room that I fell over the threshold and struck my head on the table. I fell away from the door and just barely kicked it shut before I passed out." She gave a small sniff of a laugh. "I suppose he carried on on the other side for quite a while but the doors are quite secure. I was a bit uncomfortable when I woke but very fortunate."

"Indeed," the Doctor breathed, reaching out for a moment to take her hand and looking at Tegan as she sat down next to Nyssa.

"There's just one thing," Tegan began, and then paused to make eye contact with them both. "What happened to your gun?"

Nyssa shook her head regretfully, "No idea, it was gone when I left the crew quarters. One of them must've taken it. We can only hope they only retain enough awareness to do themselves harm with it. Nothing else seems likely given their state of degeneration. They haven't maintained the motor skills or concentration it would take to aim from any distance. They were more frightened from the fire of the torch I'd made as they were of the gun."

Tegan nodded and stood up to toss the dishes in the sink, "It's not a problem for us, I don't think. They may knock each other out."

The Doctor followed her up and looked out the small window in the door. "Yes, but even that has consequences we'd like to avoid. Still, there is very little we can do about it. We should get moving. The temporal displacement is getting worse. Much worse and even I won't be able to enter into the field."

They set off again, armed with only two weapons now, and with renewed awareness of the dangers of the Ecosians. They presented a danger only up close and so at Nyssa suggestion, they did what she had done and made two torches to go along with the handweapons, burning only one at a time. They burned at a rate where two of them would last their last walking day and prevent them from having to leave any more of the Ecosians unconscious and vulnerable.

Tegan eventually arranged it so that she was walking behind the Doctor and even with Nyssa and caught the other woman's eye on the third attempt. "Are you really all right?" Tegan asked, making it seem like a demand even though she had mouthed the words in near silence.

Nyssa glanced up to see if she were in the Doctor's peripheral vision and nodded when she realized she wasn't. "I'm fine, just…" she pointed at her head and rolled her eyes a little as she answered Tegan in the same lack of tone. "In a day or so, it'll be as if it never happened." Her eyes darted to the Doctor and an expression of inquiry passed quickly over her face.

Tegan shrugged her eyes slightly and nodded. "I remembered what you showed me," she answered, her voice all but silent. "We did okay, but it was hard not to leave and look for you."

Nyssa shook her head slightly. "You did the right thing," she said, equally quiet. "He knew I'd reached somewhere safe."

They stopped talking after that, catching up with the Doctor as they moved forward and before he could turn around and wonder why they were lingering, particularly Tegan, as they were the only ones armed. The way was now littered with more debris from the Ecosians trapped and struggling to survive. The taint of decay added to the feeling that they were moving through a massive crypt, one that might be their own and would be the Doctor's were they to fail. At least they would soon reach the point where they could try and end the situation.

That became evident a few hours later when the Doctor held up his hand for them to stop and went to what appeared to be a cracked spot on the wall of the tunnel, one deep enough to see the metal support that had been melded into the stone itself. When the Doctor touched it, his fingers came away with several flakes of what appeared to be rust on them. He made a confident face and sat down on the ground. Nyssa immediately sat down opposite him and began the process of clearing away the mental clutter of the deranged Ecosians so that the Doctor could more easily read the unstable time fields. Tegan walked to the opposite side of the hallway and drew her weapon, watching over them from where she had the greatest field of vision.

Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. The Doctor finally lowered his fingers from his temples and let himself sag forward for a moment. Tegan crossed back over and helped him rise. "Is it worse?"

"Much, we'll be there soon enough. The temporal distortion is now affecting the geophysical structure of the moon."

Tegan looked around them with a sudden new worry. "You mean earth---moonquakes, while we're this far down?"

"Possibly but the TARDIS is stabilizing the field now to some degree. The metal is an artificial amalgam. It can be broken down more easily than a natural element, the hematite, for example, that primarily makes up these walls. It's probably a combination of nickel and chelsidium and silver to soften it for pouring and make it rust-proof, but all metal breaks down eventually. On Earth, Tegan, when they find the Titanic, it will have been converted mostly to rust and still be standing. That took decades, however, here we'll only need a day or so more, and the rate of decay is only a tiny fraction of a centimeter deep. Not to worry I should think."

Tegan didn't remind him he'd said that before and added cave-in to her list of worries, then realized the TARDIS would, Miros be damned, probably come and get them. It was good to know the time-ship was still safe behind the guards that the Doctor had left. With little else to do besides walk and stare into the darkness, she stopped letting her mind wander and speculate on what she was going to do to Miros if she got her hands on him, and focused on the TARDIS, seeing it clearly in her mind, remembering exactly as she had seen it last in her artist's eye, the scratches on the glass panes, the nicks in the paint. It was easier than she thought, remembering each detail, seeing it before her, so real she could almost touch it. She caught herself raising her empty hand and stopped, then stopped walking altogether as another part of her mind seemed to stir, an awareness not of sight or sound or touch, but awareness like a warm breeze that flowed back and forth in her mind, an awareness that felt like a surprise visit from a new friend. It faded slowly but not completely and she opened her eyes to find the Doctor in front of her, smiling thinly but with infinite warmth.

"Homesick?"

Tegan smiled. Not long ago, his question would have meant Earth. "Yes and no. I feel like a little bit of home is with me."

"And so it is. I was aware of you this time, of course, but you reached her entirely on your own. Remarkable." The delight in his eyes faded to curiosity in moments but they pressed on as he pondered, walking slowly. On occasion his breathing was the loudest sound to be heard and both women remained near to him, glancing behind his back at one another with frustration and worry. Nyssa eventually reached into the bag she had retained throughout her solo adventures and withdrew one of the pressure injectors she had pre-loaded. "Doctor, you said we're within two days of the T.I.F.?"

"What?" He looked at her oddly for a moment. "Oh, yes. Yes, I did. We are."

"You're quite certain?"

"Yes, the metal decay, the small accelerations and decelerations of time around us, it's all very telling. Why?"

"I synthesized more of the counteragent to the toxin than we needed. I can give you an additional dosage which, given the short time we would have left, shouldn't deter it effectiveness, even if you're becoming more symptomatic and potentially developing a tolerance for it."

Nyssa frowned to herself as he stared at her for a moment, almost as confused as Tegan would have been by one of his answers. Except that this time even Tegan understood what Nyssa was offering. It took the Doctor, however, only long enough to understand for the two women to register his confusion, and then he smiled quickly. "Splendid. Go on. Very good of you to have thought ahead."

Nyssa stood on tiptoe and pressed the injector to his throat and the color returned to his face a moment later. And drained a little when they made the next turn, three bodies lay on the ground as the light surrounding them flooded the new corridor. These looked older than any of the others they had encountered and seemed to have been died as a result of some scuffle between themselves, a result of the dementia. The hands of one of them, a woman, were around the throat of a man who was slightly smaller, but they could see through a tear in the worn fabric of her gray, filthy uniform that at least two of her ribs were broken. A jagged three inch piece of the third body's skull lay next to it in a crusted pool of black. They moved on without comment but an hour later Tegan raised a hand. "They've stopped."

Nyssa glanced over at her, "Who?"

"No more howling, no more grunting, we haven't heard anything for hours."

The Doctor nodded. "Yes, you're right. They've probably got some rudimentary sense that this place is "evil" or such. They're only operating on instinctual levels."

Tegan smiled grimly at his confirmation, "That and we're past the food source." She relaxed a bit, enough to holster the weapon in her hand, and then looked up at the Time Lord. "I think it's about time that we were finding a home for the night. I know I'll get more rest than the last one." Nyssa smiled thinly as Tegan looked her in the eye.

It took another twenty minutes of searching, mostly because many of the doors now lead to rooms of equipment and monitors. There were several of the crew quarters still available but many of them showed greater states of use than the ones before and the companions hypothesized that those they had been staying in were auxiliary quarters of crew persons preparing to rotate into service who had not yet had time to fully settle in. The fourth set of quarters they found were clean, obviously previously empty, but still well-stocked. The Doctor, who had been holding up far better in the wake of the booster of the counteragent, seemed to wilt as soon as the opportunity to rest came. He went not to the sofa in the living area as soon as they entered, but to the bath as Tegan bustled about the kitchen and Nyssa about the small table. He emerged a small time later and went right to the wide, low bunk. Nyssa descended on him in moments, briefly examining him with the bio-scanner and working the cramps out of his calves.

"I don't want to give you another injection just yet. I'll do that in a few hours. You could still begin to build a tolerance to it that would make it less effective and you'll need to be in the best shape possible soon,' she said quietly, her fingers making short work of the tense muscle fibers just below his knee and moving to the inner muscles. Her technique was more accurate than Tegan's - she knew the structures beneath the skin better - but he found he missed the gentle chatter his other companion often engaged in to make the situation more comfortable for them both. It had even worked after a moment when he'd felt her hands had moved down along his thigh, although, by now, he would've argued with the phrase "Just Tegan".

Nyssa finished just as Tegan entered with the plate of food, hopefully the last time they were to see the staples of Ecosian dinner fare, and handed it to him once he was sitting up. She returned with Nyssa's and her own, then went back for the glasses of tea as Nyssa prepared another injection and put the rest of her equipment away and retrieved the thermal blanket in exchange.

Smelling of something floral she had found in the bath, Tegan settled down next to The Doctor a short time later, after Nyssa had made the obligatory show of falling asleep first. It was a show that required little effort, however, tired as they all were from the unaccustomed stresses of the past few days. The Doctor hesitated a bit as he turned toward her, even as she waited for his now familiar weight and coolness. Mistaking his hesitance, she slipped her arm beneath him and rested her hand just below the nape of his neck. "Come on. It's almost over."

The Doctor lay down but a small distance from her, enough that he could still see her as he spoke. "That's just the point, Tegan. I wanted to tell you again, while I have the chance, what your help has meant to me the past few days. You've not only helped me in a way that was difficult for us both, you've done a great deal to make it easier for me."

A small smile overtook Tegan's face and she turned toward him, her top hand taking hold of his arm through the cool linen shirt. "Tell me something, your wife, she put up with a lot of craziness, right? Authorities and councilors and colleagues all calling you insane? Late nights, cold dinners, unwanted guests, investigations?"

"That and more." He admitted, not sure where she was going but patient.

"All right, and why? Because she cared about you, cared about you enough that, whatever it took, she wanted you to be happy, even if you were never safe."

The Doctor smiled in quiet remembrance, not seeing the woman across from him for a moment, but another, a face he could still recall in detail despite the centuries, and then for a moment, he could see them both, their expressions of concern and patience identical. "That's true as well. I can't follow you yet though, perhaps I'm still unsettled."

Tegan's hand went from his arm to his cheek. Reflexively, his eyes closed and he turned toward the fire of her touch. "The point is, Doc, she put up with all that, in the end because she believed in you. But as much as she believed in what you were doing, she must've loved who you were, and when you love someone, if you're forced to leave them, you don't go hoping no one else will ever make them happy again. What do you suppose she'd do to you now if she knew that even being around a woman set your teeth on edge? Was she selfish enough that she'd want you to spend centuries alone?"

As if in answer, his head dropped onto her arm and his eyes remained closed. "Not hardly and I suppose she'd kill me."

"So do I. And I'm not talking about me… I'm just saying… let it go. What's the point of living for centuries if you can't let anyone give a damn you're alive?"

The Doctor lay still for several moments, her words gently piercing him, bursting the bubble of immunity that had surrounded him for so long, too long. He nodded his head and cradled the hand holding his face, turning her palm to kiss it as he settled toward her. Tegan saw the tears sliding sideways from his closed eyes just before his head settled against the curve of her neck, and she curled her arm beneath him, stroking his forehead. She had given him too much to think about and wanted to lighten the mood. "There's just one more thing I want to ask you now that I've introduced you to the concept of pillow talk."

The Doctor smiled against her breast as she hoped. "I vaguely recall the concept, Tegan, just haven't engaged in it for a few centuries. All right, what is it you want to know?" He'd half guessed already.

"Well, I've carried you through the jungle, let you play hopscotch in my head, intentionally charged into a freighter full of pissed off Cybermen - killed one, run up against the Master, cooked for you, and now spent a few nights being the power supply to a thermal blanket, but I'll trade you all that for the answer to one question: what the hell's your name?"

He smiled again, and laughed into her shoulder. It was just what he'd expected and a fair enough exchange. And he told her, lifting his head to say it slowly and carefully, then repeated it twice at her request. It had been so long since he'd said it aloud it actually sounded odd to his own ears. She nodded politely and thanked him but the side of her mouth quirked up after a moment. "I think I'll stick with "Doc"."

"Well, if the situation calls for it and should you feel so inclined, Thete will do."

Tegan laughed again and kissed the top of his head, and lay awake until the healing trance had taken him in full.


	11. Chapter 11

"Now what?"

"Excellent question, Tegan."

They had reached the chamber containing the unstable temporal initiation field, a vast cavern in the heart of the small moon that barely let them see the other side. In the center of it was a twisting ball of blue and white light. Ragged surges of light sometimes extruded from the surface only to be drawn back in as they met some invisible barrier. The rest of the chamber was filled with the rotating streaks of light, strobing flashes of it that bounced off the smooth gray walls with blinding intensity. They took it all in from the glass-walled control room overlooking the chamber, filled with seven rows of consoles and displays, all humming patiently. It had been sealed against the intrusion of the sad souls who had once staffed it and was now coated with a layer of lubricant-laden dust.

Benefiting from the second injection of the counteragent, the Doctor sat down in front of the first bank of controls and poked until the screen lit. It took a moment but the screen suddenly rippled and changed into something different for each of them. Tegan knew instantly that the projected translation circuitry of the TARDIS had changed the readouts into English for her but saw little point in it as it still made as much sense to her as if it had been in Ecosian. She couldn't even imagine what a Temporal Flux Limitation Field was but that was what the Doctor finally settled on when he finished scrolling through the control options. Nyssa leaned over and looked at the data written in electric blue on the screen below a diagram of the rotating energy field and a banner that read "Critical Failure".

"Good heavens, how could they have been so foolish?"

"Arrogance", the Doctor answered. "What they've done is not allowed for a bleed-over circuit once they'd attained the critical mass needed to create the stabilized energy shell. Instead the excess power entered the Temporal Initiation Field without any sort of containment. They assumed plasma would have no impact on the nullified area the field occupied, that it had to be a physical object to have an effect or be affected."

"Not remembering that they were creating an access to an existence where energy and matter are interchangeable on some levels." Nyssa completed, her head shaking in frustration. "And the excess energy is causing the contraction and expansion of the field. When it contracts time accelerates, when it expands time slows."

The Doctor looked up from the readouts, which for him were, of course, in Gallifreyan, long enough to smile. "You've been an excellent student of my rambling, Nyssa."

She returned his smile and rested a hand briefly on his arm, "As I will continue to be."

They went back to work trying to understand the extent of the instability. Tegan listened as she always did, catching bits and pieces that made sense in terms she understood. What she could put together was that Miros had blown the fuse of his time travel toaster by running too much current through it. "So how do you pull the plug on him?"

Absorbed in tenth-level maths and technology, albeit idiotically primitive by his standards, the Doctor kept working for a moment before he answered her. "Sadly, it's not as simple as depriving the field of power. It has to be dispersed on just the right parameter so that the chronomitic particles are rendered harmless by venting them into space and Miros's family has to be removed at a time interval as close as possible on a physical level as when they entered it. I doubt he would want to have his wife be old enough to be his mother and his children his own age. And they've done nothing to deserve having their lives curtailed or radically altered. Time out here has passed as it normally might, for them they have aged and regressed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times."

Tegan came away from staring out of the locked door and looked down at the pulsing sphere of light. "But you can go in there and get them out."

"Well, I have to find them first. Ah, third balcony down and in toward the center." He looked up from the readouts and walked to the window, his arms folding against the chill. The energy that was emanating from the fluctuating time field apparently contained very little heat. He pointed at the distant balcony and, counting up from the floor, the two women spotted the square-railed landing. There were three figures piled up near the door, all three were dressed in white attire that was probably ceremonial. It was impossible to tell more than that at this distance.

"All right," Tegan pressed, "So how do you go into that thing and come out?"

The Doctor sat down again, back at the station he'd activated, and stared at the display with his mouth twisting. "As always, it's very difficult to explain. I can generate a limited temporal field as chronomitic particles are part of my genetics. They've built up in the two of you as you've traveled with me, a sort of positive radioactive by-product of traveling in the TARDIS, much the same as gradual exposure to sunlight protects the skin from its effects. Slow exposure stabilizes organic matter." He worked a moment more, ignoring the slow tightening in his chest. "The amount of protection I'll have, of course, is dependent upon the frequency of the fluctuations. I'll need time to adjust the field protecting me as time surges forward and back."

Nyssa sat down and began work to activate a second console, seeing the controls through the TARDIS interface in her own language. "Then the first thing we should do is observe the field for long enough to learn if there is a pattern to those fluctuations that we can predict."

"And there's also the matter of field density and if I can generate a field that is strong enough to withstand the accelerations and decelerations, even if we know how often they occur. As long as the TARDIS is helping to contain the fluctuations, it should be safe enough for you to accompany me down to the doorway outside the balcony, but we'll need to get those readings first."

Nyssa continued to monitor the fields and record the flux intervals and any unexpected variables and spikes. She had searched until she found an adequate collection of the event programs, which had a blank back page, so that she could fill it with notes they could both read. There were dozen of portable data readers around and she could recharge them from the main consoles they had reaccessed but finding away for her to enter the text into it Trakenite, onto Ecosian controls, for the Doctor to read in Gallifreyan was a bit much for even the TARDIS. And beyond that, her knowledge and the Doctor's of time travel equations would far exceed what the Ecosian mathematics could allow for on the input system. Nyssa came back to the Doctor a few hours later, offering him the sheets of paper.

He smiled at her brightly, looking up from his own research as Tegan dozed nearby, "And where did you find a pen?"

"Pens, actually. I believe the team of scientists was supposed to end up signing autographs. There were several of them engraved at the stations." She sat down on the floor across from the Doctor and looked at the assemblage of data. "You've used their technology more aptly than they did."

"Well, it's all in the knowing. I should be ready shortly." He looked up from Nyssa to Tegan as stretched, awoken by their voices. She came to her knees and looked over at the T.I.F. through the glass walls. "Tegan?"

She turned, fully awake already to smile at him. "We're done here. I just need a moment to go over Nyssa's notes on the temporal field. Then we'll make our way down to that balcony and see if Miros is a man of his word in at least some respect."

The older woman grimaced but let the opportunity to make a biting comment pass. "All right, do we know how to get down there?" Tegan was picking up the bag Nyssa had been carrying, apparently having decided that the threat of the Ecosians had been so diminished that she could now spare her firing arm for other pursuits. The Doctor watched her for a moment and, despite the fact they were about to venture back out into another set of corridors, now with a few sets of stairwells, found her judgment likely true. He relaxed himself on that count and let his mind wander as Nyssa used the master codekey to open the wide heavy doors that lead to the balcony levels. There must have been some ceremony going on when they engaged their first Temporal Initiation Field, unable to look into the future to see its failure… There was debris everywhere, the remains of the panicked rush to escape the uncontrolled collapses and rebirths of the T.I.F. A dozen bodies were strewn throughout the corridors, and two at the bottom of the first flight of stairs they encountered. Time and exposure had left them as little more than dried husks in clothes that had once been grand. The smell was no longer the reek of decay but the musty choke of untended graves. They moved through it quickly and looking straight ahead, kicking aside the scattering of event programs, glasses, bottles, and serving trays. The Ecosians had died preparing to celebrate.

Three spiraling staircases and three rounded hallways flanking the circular chamber unwound before the travelers as they moved. For the Doctor's sake, Nyssa was glad that the stairs lead downward, and glad that Tegan was again wearing sensible shoes. The stairways were metal and open, leaving none of them entirely steady. The only relief was the hallways, which here had received a coat of deep blue paint. It wasn't much brighter, but it would have been enough to lessen their dread had it not been for the bodies of those who had died trying to escape. Halfway down the fourth hallway, the Doctor raised his hand and brought them to a stop. He was opposite a door that looked no different from all the others, a door with a rounded top, split down the middle and recessed half a meter into the wall of the corridor. The Doctor approached it slowly, as if it were a bomb he was about to diffuse, touching it as if it were a thousand degrees.

His hand bounced back a moment later, flung off like a fly on the neck of a horse. He stood silently for a moment, his thoughts almost audible, and then tried again. This time, as his hand approached the door, a dancing green light began to stir around it, obviously growing stronger and denser as he got nearer to it. This time he was able to touch the door with one hand and then both, triggering the lock. He looked back over his shoulder as far as he could. "Move away, both of you. As soon as I can stabilize the chronomitic particles in my body, I'm going to enter the field and open the door. The resistance that you have will not be enough to withstand the effects of the T.I. F."

"Wait a moment," Nyssa ordered, coming forward with the injector in her hand, "One last time and then I hope we'll have the real antidote." The Doctor bared his neck as she reached to inject him again and thanked her quickly as she moved off, joining Tegan at the far side of the wide hallway. The blur of green light around the Doctor eventually enveloped him completely and the two women watched as above his head a slender crack of light appeared and expanded. They got a quick glimpse of him as he bent over the first of the Miros family, shaking his head in quiet astonishment as she slowly aged before his eyes and then he sealed the door shut and sat down, concentrating on further strengthening the temporal stability he had called into existence around him.

As on Logopolis, literally in another life, the figures of temporal physics entered the Time Lord's mind, becoming part of reality, emanating from his body as the synaptic energy that was the physical existence of knowledge became the basis of the telepathic matrix that exuded protection around him. It took several moments but the bubble of energy that surrounded the unnaturally aging body of Miros's wife pressed around her but did not envelope her, not yet. The time, as it had not been for some months, was not right. The Doctor watched as she suddenly stopped aging and with unsettling slowness her hair darkened and shrank back within her head. Some ten years of lines faded from her face and hands and her body once again began to fill out the white gown that swept the ground around her. She regressed to a beautiful young woman some twenty years from her oldest moment. Tiring steadily, the Doctor watched the procession twice more until she had reached the age that was the fulcrum of the process, the one she had been upon entering, somewhere in what would seem like her late forties to a Human woman. At that moment, the field surrounding her, extended from the mind of the Time Lord, snapped open and held them both. Rising from his cross-legged seat on the plush carpeting, he quickly rose and lifted the Ecosian woman in his arms then opened the door, hoping that Nyssa and Tegan had had enough sense to keep their distance.

"Stay back!" The Doctor shouted as he cleared the opening door and then moved half-way across the hallway before dropping to his knees and gently placing the Ecosian woman on the floor. Tegan ran over and dropped to the other side of her.

"Is she still alive?" Tegan looked down at the small Ecosian woman quickly, knowing that she was mostly concerned that the woman was alive because only her living DNA could save the Doctor, if Miros was good for his word. God, how she hated "if".

"She should be," the Doctor breathed his head down as he gasped at the recycled air of tunnel. Nyssa went to her knees beside him, taking his arm.

"It's almost over, Doctor. Miros's wife is alive but her mind is very blurred. You must get the others before he will act. I will do what I can from here."

Tegan glanced up at the other woman. "He can't go back in there this soon."

"I have to, Tegan. I timed our arrival at just the right interval in the power cycle of the T.I.F. In a few minutes the cycle will speed up beyond the point where I can adjust and remain that way for another 96 hours. We were able to extrapolate the cycle of the acceleration and deceleration fields based on," he looked at the Australian woman for a long moment, his eyes slowly losing focus, "based on something to do with…".

"Doctor!" Nyssa's voice was sharp as she shook him, grabbing his temples in her strong hands. She reached him after a moment and he stood slowly, looking toward the door as he took her hands in his and lowered them. She tightened her grip before he let go. "Wait. Can you extend the field around both of us if I help you? That would mean you would only have to make one more trip."

The Doctor stood for a long moment, indecision on his face. "I don't know. The eventual power output would be the same but to do it all once may be too much. The children are young, however, no more than twelve or thirteen by human appearance and you needn't move them far."

"Then it is possible?" The Trakenite persisted and shared a desperate glance with Tegan.

"If not and you become trapped, I'd have to also retrieve you."

Nyssa shook her head and tightened her grip. 'If so we have time for that if we move now. Our chances are better this way."

That made up the Doctor's mind and she let go of his hands to let him lay his hands upon her shoulders. Left out of the picture for the moment, Tegan returned to kneel beside the Ecosian woman, chafing her wrists to help her wake. She tried to keep her mind on what she could do for her and off the slow aura of green light that was building around the Doctor and her friend. If something happened to them both… Tegan couldn't help it; she looked up as the door opened onto the white-carpeted balcony. Two smallish boys lay upon it, toppled over one another as their mother had tried to shield them with her body.

Nyssa looked at the Doctor with unquestioning confidence and inestimable trust as they stood over the young Ecosians, their hands linked and the field again slowly covering the young boys but not opening to them. At their feet both children grew to adulthood and then as if someone had simply reversed a film of their entire lives, they slowly became no more than toddlers lying on the bright carpeting. The spectacle made it hard for Nyssa to concentrate and she closed her eyes until she heard the Doctor's voice, perhaps only in her mind, quietly utter "Now."

Their hands dropped and they bent to quickly retrieve the children he had enveloped in the stable temporal field they had created together. Nyssa reached for the dark-haired boy the Doctor handed up to her and wrapped her hands around his white-clad waist to drag him out. Having a much easier time of it, the Doctor retrieved the second boy, this one slightly bigger and they moved toward the opening door.

Nyssa cleared it first, dragging the boy to the center of the corridor next to his mother before easing him down into Tegan's waiting arms. She lowered him the rest of the way to the floor and turned to help the Doctor with the second boy. She took a breath to call Nyssa's name but it was unnecessary. The younger woman turned around in time to break the Doctor's fall. She went to the ground with him but controlled their descent and Tegan caught the pale Ecosian boy as he slid from the Doctor's hands. She eased him down to the floor and laid him so that his head rested upon his mother's arm. Tegan glanced down at the Time Lord and Nyssa as the younger woman sat on the floor with him between her legs, her hands cradling his head to her shoulder as she debated whether to let him rest for a few moments or to attempt to revive him.

Eyes on the Doctor, Tegan came to her feet slowly, her gaze moving to sweep every crevice and shadow of the corridor, her fire building as she searched for the monitoring devices that had to be focused on them. "That's it! That's it! We've played your stupid game, run through madmen, tramped around in the dark for a week, and then saved your family on top of it all! Now, you get us out of here and you give us that antidote, or we will find you and you will be sorry. The TARDIS will tell the Time Lords where you are and that you've killed the Lord President of Gallifrey. What do you think is going to happen to your miserable self then!"

She had taken her breath for the next round when a wonderfully familiar sound filled the wide corridor, a groaning, wheezing sound that could only have come from one source. Tegan fell silent as a familiar blue shape came into existence before them. She'd been happy to see the TARDIS before but never as happy as now. She pulled out her key and proceeded to move toward it when she nearly tripped on what the transmat beam brought into existence before them, a long vial filled with fluid, topped with a complex lock. Tegan snatched it up and pressed the unconscious finger of the Ecosian woman to the top. A second passed before the lock simply fell away.

Nyssa twisted around, pulling the pressure injector from her back pocket and injecting the Doctor with the last of the temporary counteragent as a precaution before taking the priceless vial from Tegan's shaking hands. Nyssa purged the injector and then refilled it, struggling to stay upright with the Doctor still resting against her. Tegan grabbed his shoulders and took some of the weight off her friend as Nyssa maneuvered backward and Tegan lowered the Doctor's head into her lap. Nyssa turned his head to the side and with her own hands now shaking, injected what she hoped was the antidote into the Time Lord's throat.

He didn't react at first and then did so slowly, seeming to worsen to the eyes of anyone who had not known the symptoms inflicted by the toxin. His muscles relaxed completely for the first time in many days and his breathing became what would be normal… for a Human. Tegan wiped at the tears in her eyes and stood. "I'll get the kids in the TARDIS, and then we'll both get the wife and the Doctor."

Nyssa nodded and stayed where she was, her fingers on the Doctor's throat, lifting his eyelids, and seeing that his pupils were dilated beyond what the dim light would have called for. Tegan opened the door and turned to lift the first boy and pull him into the familiar and very much missed time ship. She smiled in spite of herself when she entered the console room with her burden and lowered the boy to the floor. She propped the door open in a spite of paranoia and returned with the second boy a moment later. Nyssa had worked her way out from under the Doctor and lowered his head to the floor when Tegan emerged the second time. "Let's get Mrs. Miros into the TARDIS."

The Australian shook her head quickly, "No, take the Doctor first. We don't want any surprises."

Nyssa's head lifted, "Of course." Between the two of them they got the Time Lord upright and into the TARDIS, retrieving Miros's wife a moment later. Nyssa stood at the console and looked at the data it was offering with concern. "I've tried tracing the signal that we were originally sent but there's nothing at the source so it must have come from a ship of some sort. I'll send out an auto-alert on the same frequency and as for getting out of here I can rematerialize us on the surface to wait."

"Can you rematerialize us in orbit over Ecosia? I want off this damn planet."

"Agreed." The column rotor activated and brought them away from the dark interior of Ecosia Beta, away from the madness, and into the cold arms of space, and the welcome brightness of the Ecosian sun.

There were plenty of rooms on the TARDIS. They put the boys in two of them and their mother in one nearby. All were alive but showed no sign of consciousness. The Doctor they wanted somewhat closer and managed with the wheelchair to get him into their own room. The toxin was slowly being dissolved according to the tests Nyssa had done but the strain of creating the chronomitic field had drained the last of his strength. Nyssa had guessed there was little more she could do than keep him hydrated while they waited out the self-induced coma he was using to restore himself. She guessed it wouldn't last overly long and just being back in the TARDIS was a good thing for them all. Every safeguard the time ship could activate, the Trakenite and Tegan brought online, and they watched and waited for a sign that their success would be acknowledged by more than the antidote.


	12. Chapter 12

They slept in shifts over the next few hours, alternately checking on the Ecosians and the Doctor who looked more like his normal self all the time as he laid in Tegan's bed, now breathing so rarely that they knew the coma was almost what he could have achieved in a Zero Room. He'd almost finished building a new one but it remained unfinished six corridors down and two turns left as the TARDIS was configured now. For the three Ecosians, things were different, they showed signs of agitation as soon as the first hints of consciousness stirred within them, their breathing disturbed, their eyes moving quickly back and forth behind the closed lids. One of the children woke first, raging and screaming, his hands clawing and reaching as Nyssa and Tegan bound him to the small bed to protect him and themselves then did the same to his mother and brother. It took the most powerful sedative Nyssa could synthesize to keep them unconscious. The temporal grace of the TARDIS prevented the weapons Miros had left them from even stunning them.

A full day went by before the TARDIS communication console bleeped a single long note and a solitary set of coordinates flashed on the screen. Nyssa entered them in with a slow hand and Tegan set the time rotor into motion. They materialized in the stateroom of a ship, a large one with an interior that was blue and lined by large windows overlooking Ecosia. Knowing it wouldn't work, but knowing Acquintal Miros wouldn't know that either, Tegan took the weapon he had left them in her hand and watched him on the monitor, standing outside the door of the TARDIS, hands raised, his arms spread. Alone.

He walked in slowly when Nyssa opened the doors and looked square into the barrel of the weapon in Tegan's hand. "There's no need. I'm unarmed." He wasn't; Nyssa made sure of it but the gun he didn't know was useless never wavered. He was dressed in loose black trousers, a long blue tunic, and a black robe of obvious quality.

Tegan didn't speak for the first few minutes, too angry for words. She got control of her temper with an effort and drew a long, slow breath. "Well, since you're unarmed, maybe we should throw you back down in that madhouse you've made. Those poor people, the Doctor, your whole planet in danger… What kind of a monster are you? Just who do you think you---!"

"Tegan."

Both women and the Ecosian turned and watched the Doctor walk slowly into the room, wearing his shirt and trousers only. He placed himself between Tegan and Nyssa and let his hands slide into his pockets, a familiar gesture that made both women smile. He smiled at them both in return before addressing Miros, every inch himself again. 'You've come to see your wife, your children. Fine, but why the delay? I'll tell you, shall I? You were afraid of what you would find, and rightly so." He stepped back, gesturing through the interior doors of the TARDIS, knowing the time ship would lead Miros where he needed to go.

Miros hesitated but moved toward the open doors with halting steps and then stopped himself against the cool, white frame. "You knew?"

"I knew there was a very good chance. They're mad. The organic body might survive for a time but the mind is not designed to be ripped back and forth through time, to evolve and devolve, to know life and death in the space of moments over and over again. I also knew I had no hope of convincing you otherwise until you learned for yourself. If you knew the others were mad, how could you doubt the effects of continual time displacement on those exposed so directly?"

"I thought there was a chance because they were being drawn back and forth through time, that the moment of their entry would still exist." Miros answered, somewhat defiantly but it was obvious he had hoped against the truth all along.

Unmoved, the Doctor resumed his lecture. "Without chronomitic particles built up in the correct manner, living tissue cannot survive time travel intact, but that was something your primitive experiments had yet to uncover."

Miros started to turn but then his head spun back at the sound of a woman's twisting scream as the sedative Nyssa had made lost the battle with the deranged Ecosian. She drew her breath for the next and it came muffled through the heavy doors. "For what it's worth, Doctor. The RNA inhibitor was flawed, intentionally. You would have ultimately survived regeneration."

"Oh, how kind of you," Tegan spat, and the Doctor looked on without comment, content to let her speak. "He could go through dying just so you would have a bit of revenge if he failed? And now what about the planet? If that thing in there isn't collapsed right, you'll kill everyone on your world."

Miros shrugged feebly, his eyes on the floor of the time-ship. "That's been done now. Ecosia is safe."

The Doctor moved at once to the console of the TARDIS and stabbed impatiently at a few controls, rocking back on his bare heels with a sigh. "He's right. It's been diffused, lapsed out in a cloud of chronomitic particles that in their current concentration are lethal. That should dissipate in a few hours, and harm no one else." He walked around the console, looking down at Miros with a cold, slow stare. "Send a medical team back for your wife and children, then use that knowledge of medicine to try and help those people trapped down there, and your family. What knowledge they have of chronomitic poisoning, I will order Gallifrey to transmit here inside the twelve hours.

"In the meantime, Mr. Miros, get the hell off my TARDIS."


	13. Prologue

Prologue

The corridors of the TARDIS were long and often winding depending on her mood but bright and with the promise of a new wonder instead of a new nightmare around the corners. They were on a long straight flight, flying what the Doctor had cheekily called "NoWhen". The reason for their journey was to restore the chronomitic particles in the Doctor's genetic make-up, and to completely replace them in the case of Nyssa who now slept under the influence of the delta wave inducer to allow them to build up faster. Tegan, for her part, was enjoying the sanity and quiet and the need to put off their next adventure. This trip would end on a nameless world where parrots and butterflies would compete to impress them. Tegan had wandered into the pool area of the TARDIS, then past the library, and past the garden but then turned around and went back into it, stretching out on the cool grass and looking up at a synthesized pink and lavender sky. For her it was an alien world somewhere that was steeped with a permanent sunset. Safe and still tired in spirit, Tegan slept, and… dreamed.

The walls and the floor around her seemed made of mist, drawing slowly and warmly over her bare legs, swirling in her wake as she walked as if on a cloud and the sunset still loomed above her. She hadn't felt this peaceful even as a child and it was a relief after the darkness and the madness and the fear of the past weeks, one that counterbalanced it completely. She would have to come here again after their next adventure. Smiling as she strolled through the gentle oblivion, she didn't seek it out when she heard a voice from nowhere, knowing it wasn't a threat and what she could hear were not words but impressions, fleeting glances and feelings and intent. Her name, the Doctor laying on the ground on Earth, a man with curly hair and massive scarf, and then her Doctor caught in the throes of regeneration trauma, the cliffs of Castrovalva, the Urbankans, a dead Cyberman at her feet, Adric, then the TARDIS on the streets of Amsterdam, as much a home as if she'd gone back to the farm. She got another sudden impression, one of apology, and then seven clear words that brought her awake. 'I wanted you here. He was right.'

Tegan lay on the ground for several minutes more, breathing loudly before she sat up. She looked down at her hand when something tickled it not consistent with the grass and saw the tiny cable being pulled back into the ground, and knew right away it was one of the telepathic circuits of the TARDIS. She grabbed it just before it disappeared and in the moment of connection gave the TARDIS six simple words back. 'Thank you. It's where I belonged.'

She found the Doctor where she always did on these long trips if he wasn't repairing something in the console room, stretched out in the library looking none the worse for wear, his spectacles on his nose as turned the pages in a long, heavy volume. A simulated fire burned for no reason but atmosphere in the fireplace close to where he sat. It gave off what felt like very real heat and a pleasant smoky scent, all of it perfectly real except it wasn't. Tegan watched the Time Lord for several moments, knowing he knew she was there before she spoke. "What are you reading?"

He didn't look up for a moment, then dropped in a book mark and clapped the tome shut. "If a dimension existed where such things did happen, I think I'd like to visit Hogwarts."

Tegan grinned and felt her red skirt hike as it rode up her legs when she sat down on the tan leather ottoman under his feet. "That boy gets in more trouble than you almost."

"Well, then perhaps we ought to change your name to Hermione."

Tegan laughed, they both did, but then shook her head. "No thanks, I don't have brains or the work ethic. I've run off to join the Galactic circus instead of hunting down another job and paying bills."

"Oh, you earn you keep, don't doubt that." The Doctor brought his legs down and sat forward, "I escaped to Hogwarts for my own reasons, Tegan. To not think for a while because I've been thinking too much."

"Nearly dying will do that to you. I guess when you were threatened with regeneration before you didn't have so much time to think about it."

"Well, I knew the stakes the last time, the likelihood but there was always a chance. The Time Lords allowed me to appear to my prior self to be of some reassurance of the potential survival of the Universe. I was quite the harbinger, wasn't I?"

Tegan shrugged slowly, "Well, with all I've seen, that's still the weirdest day of my life."

The Doctor leaned forward farther so that their legs were touching, "And the one where I saw what potential you would have if you stayed."

She started to give him a snappy answer back but then realized it wasn't the time. Instead she turned toward him and folded her arms on her knees. "That thinking that you were doing, is it thinking that you want to talk about?"

"No," he answered after a moment, his eyes hazel in the golden firelight. "Thinking that I want to act about actually; it's time to contemplate only the future for once, and not how it relies so much on the past."

Tegan didn't move when his hand slid forward to take her own, simply let him have it, his skin warmed by the fire to nearly the touch of her own. He twisted it so that their fingers interlaced and they each made the effort to join their other hands. Tegan kept hers from tightening carefully, letting him lead, and then realizing he was waiting for her. She lifted his right hand in her own and kissed it, a chaste and gentle effort that made him close his eyes and smile. A moment later she slid onto the sofa beside him, hoping she wasn't misreading the whole situation. She took the chance that she wasn't and let go of his hands so that she could reach for the hem of his sweater. It was gone in moments and with his help.

Certain now she knew what he wanted, Tegan raised to her knees and leaned forward to kiss him, only the Doctor's head was still down and she ended up kissing the bridge of his nose to tilt it upright. She heard the slow half–gasp as she did and moved down quickly enough that her mouth covered his as it hung just slightly open, using her own lips to spread his more. His hands went slowly to her shoulders and she let him move her closer. They continued back until she was fully on top of him and they struggled gently for a moment to remove their shoes, laughing for the first time.

Tegan lifted up when he reached for the clasp holding her bright red and white blouse, pushing up to straddle him as the skirt slid up her legs. "Oh, no, a couple of hundred years in the paper, I get to unwrap things first…" Her fingers fell onto the buttons he had so shyly protected on the exam table and this time she moved without interference, opening the buttons but not spreading the shirt. Tegan lifted her hips and pulled the rest of it from his trousers and only when every button was undone did she pull him upright and slide the cool fabric from his shoulders, glancing with a quick smile at the question marks on the collar as she tossed it to the floor. She was going to have a few questions answered tonight, that was certain. She caught his hands when he sat partially up, his long arms glistening gold as they reached for her. Tegan let him pull her down for one long, slow kiss, his lips cool against her own but soft.

The Doctor slid back and propped himself up against the pillows on the couch, a feeling far more comfortable than the smooth leathery surface of the sofa. Tegan followed him, still dressed and he reached for the snaps of her blouse and undid one before she stretched his hands out over his head. He left them there as she lightly traced her fingers on the insides of his arms, feeling his flesh tighten and looking down to see his eyes roll back toward the wall and the fire. "You're ticklish. Who'd've thought?"

He took a thin breath and looked up at her. "It's not so much that as being touched at all. It's been a considerable… well, two of your lifetimes. The mind can hold figures but the flesh forgets after so much deprivation."

"Is that a request for mercy or a clever way of saying you're a virgin again?"

The Doctor's eyes opened slightly and he looked up at the Human woman, "Actually, I think I was a bit more confident the first time." Tegan shook her head slowly then returned to where she'd been before pulling out his shirt, lowering herself onto his slender hips. She elicited a gasp from them both as she met the new swelling in his groin. He smiled and started lowering his arms, only to have Tegan restrain him again, gently and with a horribly innocent smile. She lifted her hips, still concealed in the loose but short red skirt and moved back. "No, no, a few centuries you've gone, you can wait a moment more. I'll do all the work. You just … relax."

"That sounds ambitious on your part, Tegan, and impossible on mine. I believe I've been tortured by people kinder than you." He ground his teeth but kept his hands where they were, folded above his head, a twinkle in his eyes that Tegan lost sight of as she lowered her head to kiss him again. He lay still and relaxed save where she touched him. She explored him gently, indulgently, awed by the knowledge that she was pleasuring a man who had been decades without intimacy. She tested his patience for several minutes and then let him grip her shoulders.

She teased him with the kisses as he held her, keeping him distracted until the hand that had been bracing her upright, one now fiercely hot, fell for the first time onto his abdomen. The muscles clenched beneath her hand and she had to fight to keep him from rising but her mouth was her first line of defense as she pushed him back and he broke contact after a moment, gasping. "That was unfair."

"Who's interested in being fair? How often does a woman have a man at her disposal who's waited this long? I could be terrible and you wouldn't know." She undid the first snap on his trousers to cut off his denial and his hips jerked. "Oh, touchy. Well, Doctor, in the past few days you've needed me as a scrub nurse and a heating pad, I think we'd better have a good look at you before you try anything fancy." He answered something that was lost in her mouth, against her exploring tongue, and grunted wordlessly as the second button of his trousers was opened and she released the rest of the closure.

Tegan straightened, moving to kneel between his legs and preventing him from following her, still in slight disbelief that after all these years this was happening. Her chaste and gentlemanly Doctor was lying before her, slightly flush and nearly erect, and she had been the one to break down the barriers that had held him for so long. Rassilon might be a lot of things but he hadn't been a match for a simple Earth woman.

Her awed stare lingered a few moments more than it should have. He reached for her again and she caught his hands and put them down at his sides. He understood what she needed when she took hold of his trousers and he braced his hands to lift his hips so that she could slide them off. She caught him unawares at the last moment, and one finger of each hand suddenly looped up to catch the band of his shorts as he pushed upward. With his buttocks flexed, his hips were even more compact and she relieved him of both his trousers and shorts in the same movement. Erect and twitching slightly, his penis stood up from the dark gold thatch of hair. Tegan lowered her mouth to his again so that he could have a moment where he knew she was keeping her eyes to herself. She slowly rested a hand on his chest and cocked her ear toward him. "Well, your hearts are beating a little fast for you, you're gasping for breath just a bit, and you seem to have a lot of tension and swelling."

"Oh really? I'm glad I'm in such good hands. Do you have treatment in mind?" The Doctor's head was thrown back against the stacked pillows and a fine sheen of moisture had appeared on his body. Tegan had never seen him actually sweat before and her mind danced with several possibilities as her hand traveled the trim line of his chest and lifted his hands to the snaps of her blouse. He undid them with equal slowness, admiring her as she hovered over him, warmth radiating from her equal to the fire.

Tegan straightened to shed the blouse and reached a hidden hand behind her still-present skirt that tickled against his clenched stomach. "Oh, I think I'll have to get much more personally involved in the cure, as long as you're up for it." Her concealed fingers stroked him unexpectedly on the underside of his penis and he bucked and gasped beneath her.

"Tegan, how could you? Oh dear, oh dear, not yet, not just from--." The thighs that had convulsed up against her buttocks slowly fell back onto the sofa as he regained control. Tegan looked down at him with a bit of sudden sympathy. She stood for a moment and divested herself of skirt and her panties, then sat down on the edge of the wide tan sofa, her eyes on the Doctor as his chest moved slowly and his body gleamed. He moved to take her hand when he became aware of her waiting beside him, the scent of her arousal driving his own. His eyes focused on her slowly after they opened. "Is something wrong?"

Tegan ran her hand down his bare face and this time her arousal nearly tripled as she came in contact with the sheen of moisture on his skin. She fought her way back from almost being dizzy with it then turned his face toward her. "Nothing's wrong. I just wanted to know… are you sure?"

His eyes locked onto the Human woman's with intensity that she hadn't felt when he'd entered her mind to fight the Mara. He pulled her into a kiss that left her little doubt and she slowly lifted her right leg over his waist and eased herself over him. His skin was cool and smooth but slick, his muscles tight but this time with healthy, normal tension. He was propped up against the thick pillows, waiting with incomprehensible patience, wincing and starting with every new touch, but smiling in between. All the while his eyes never left the Australian's as she reached down to stroke him gently and slowly, as if he were fine china. His legs tensed and spread as she leaned back and rested against them, letting him control her descent as she took him within her, welcoming the small sting of pain as he entered. The Doctor's eyes remained upon hers as she slowly descended. His hands twisted into the fabric of the pillows on either side of him to keep their inhuman strength from harming her as he vented the tension of her most intimate touch. A long moment passed before the Doctor called her name roughly and slowly then arched up into her arms as she began to move.

Tegan was aware of little else at first, only how large and strong he was within her, of his strangely cool yet familiar breath against her breasts, his gasps and thrusts, and her own heat. It took a moment to realize she was sensing something else, a presence, a small stream of contentment and passion that was not her own. She spared a bit of concentration and reached toward it as she had reached for the TARDIS in the tunnels of Ecosia Beta. When she did she was rewarded with the doubling of her own pleasure, for she felt not only her own but that of the Gallifreyan and the tears fell from her eyes as she felt his joy at being with and within her and shared her own in return. Their minds linked emotionally as tightly as their bodies were physically, they moved together in the firelight and knew the other as well as themselves.

Tegan felt his rush of pleasure and her own at her first orgasm, and settled down from it breathing so hard that the fringe on the mantle cloth fluttered several feet away from them. She relaxed the internal muscles gripping him and stroked his gleaming shoulders as she continued to straddle him, a sudden touch of disappointment in her eyes as she realized his erection had not waned. "You didn't…? I thought you had."

The Doctor's head fell back for a moment as he followed her lead and slowed, "No, you were right. I did, but Gallifreyan's are different in that respect, Tegan. I can reach orgasm nearly as frequently as you." A flash of deviltry entered his eyes as he looked at the surprise and then what appeared to be… greed… appearing in her own. "So, in your estimate, have I made full recovery?"

She moved on him slowly and deliberately again, and looked at him down the bridge of her nose, "Mmmph… I'm still checking. For instance, right now I can feel your pulse in the strangest place."

He was still the Doctor; he had the grace to blush just barely, only long enough for her to laugh, and then she tightened down on him again, "And I think I'll have to give you a very prolonged stress test."

"It's been seventy-odd years; I think that's in order." He quickened in rhythm with her and they lost track of time as they moved, their minds linked to the extent of Tegan's newfound abilities. She laughingly pronounced him fit and recovered the fourth time they both came together, wondering if being a Time Lord allowed him to manipulate the moments, and pitying the rest of the women on Earth who would never have a Gallifreyan man.

They settled down before the fire hours later. Tegan reclined against the stack of pillows piled up by the sofa, the throw that had been on the back of it draped over them both. The Doctor had returned out of desire where need had placed him not long ago, stretched out along Tegan's warm, firm body, only this time their flesh met along their lengths. His penis lay spent and slightly warm against her thigh, his right leg rested across both of her own. He could hear her breath and her heartbeat as he recovered from exertions that were far more pleasant than fighting the toxin had been. He could have been fine in mere seconds in the healing trance from just this but instead he was more than satisfied to restore himself under the present circumstances.

Tegan drew his attention with a gentle stroke down length of his back, "I guess we'll have to deal with 'what now' eventually, but not tonight."

The Doctor smiled and sighed, "Well, it's the middle of the day as the TARDIS clock goes but I think she kept the lights down for a reason."

Tegan grinned slightly, "She's not the jealous type-40, is she? I'm not going to' be jettisoned or anything?"

The Doctor laughed into her collarbone as she brushed his hair, slick with her sweat, from his face, "No, I shouldn't think so. I don't believe her ambitions ever extended in this direction."

"All right, I'll take that worry off my list."

"Yes, well, it's not exactly short, I'll admit but I can't promise it'll be much shorter." He lifted his head and moved back to look her in the eye, controlling it as his erection began to stir again at the friction. He wasn't sure either of them would have the strength again. "And this certainly complicates things but no regrets. I couldn't get out of my mind one of the things you said, 'what was the point of living a millennium if no one gave a damn', only remembered what mess I'd made or cleaned up."

"And that's what I get out of the deal, a man who actually is going to remember me almost forever."

"And probably longer," he answered. The Doctor eased himself closer to her and drew her into a kiss almost as chaste as one he might have given her before Ecosia Beta. "I don't know that I'll be able to resist my training eventually, to stop thinking about the consequences of allowing myself to become involved. We're supposed to observe, and correct if we find a threat to the proper order of time. We can see too much, too many alternatives, too many choices that ruin lives and worlds---."

"And only one of you I know of has had the nerve to try and stop it…. and the only other one of your lot I've met has done nothing but spread death and chaos, tried to destroy the entire Universe. Life is chance, Doctor, whether it's pushing a button to escape the Big Bang, or making love with someone when you don't know the future. You can't escape chance even if you're a Time Lord. Let's take this one and when I'm a bit too gray, if I live that long, we'll have to take our chances about what to do then, too. And as far as the rest of the Gallifrey is concerned, are they really going to be all that surprised if they find another one in your family has taken up with one of those wretched Humans?"

Chastised and satisfied, the Doctor lay back down and Tegan stared over his head into the fire, feeling as if she held the stars themselves in her arms.


End file.
